British Sugar's sites at Cantley and Wissington in Norfolk, and Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, have sliced their last beet after a challenging winter of sub-zero temperatures and prolonged rainfall.

While East Anglia's beet processing has already concluded, the firm's fourth factory at Newark in Nottinghamshire is due to close early next week, wrapping up the national campaign.

British Sugar said more than seven million tonnes of beet has been sliced, with sugar content expected to be around 17.4pc, the third highest in the last decade.

And overall yields are expected to exceed the five-year averages - despite the winter's weather challenges for farmers.

Daniel Green, agriculture director for British Sugar (Image: British Sugar)

British Sugar agriculture director Dan Green said: "I think on the whole, it's been a very successful campaign. It's certainly one of the best campaigns I can remember.

"We had a very good start, with some very good lifting conditions through the autumn, which prompted a lot of people to get a lot of beet out of the ground ahead of Christmas.

"The sugar contents early on were very good. They did dip down quite a bit after the frost, but because we'd processed 70pc of the crop by by early January when that occurred, actually the impact on the average was reduced."

Sugar beet being harvested in Norfolk (Image: Newsquest)

The plunging temperatures in early January, reaching -12C at Marham in west Norfolk, prompted a call for growers to prioritise frost-affected beet for delivery to factories as soon as possible to minimise quality issues.

"We have got monitoring that enables us to look at temperatures across where all of our fields are," said Mr Green.

"Anything we saw that we felt had some risk, we managed to work with those growers and the hauliers to get that crop in as quickly as possible because, actually, the thaw was quite slow this year, so we had time to recover those crops that were affected, and get them into the factory before they deteriorated."

Sugar beet being delivered to the British Sugar factory at Cantley (Image: British Sugar)

Mr Green said factory performances were "excellent across the board", following some major decarbonisation investments.

Almost £20m was spent on three new evaporators which were brought online last autumn at Bury St Edmunds, while the previous year saw a £43m investment in a new steam drying plant at Wissington in west Norfolk, which celebrated its 100th campaign this year.

The Cantley site, on the banks of the River Yare, kicked off this year's campaign following an £11m investment in a new combined heat and power (CHP) plant, aimed at increasing energy efficiency and reducing annual carbon emissions.

"Again, that's run really reliably," said Mr Green. "Cantley has generally been slicing 7,000 tonnes of beet per day, which is good. So, another successful investment."

The British Sugar factory at Cantley (Image: Newsquest)

The Cantley factory was due to slice its last loads of beet on Friday - about a week later than originally scheduled.

This was partly to accept contracted deliveries of beet from further south which, due to the wet conditions around the end of January, were left in the ground when the Bury St Edmunds factory closed on February 6.

Mr Green said this need for flexibility proved the value of British Sugar's new digital monitoring software and "Lifted" and "Delivered" apps, to track beet harvests and deliveries.

"What we have done is made sure that can keep Cantley running a bit longer than we originally planned, so that any growers with beet left in the ground were able to lift and deliver it after a short dry period," he said.

"We had 100 harvesting contractors who recorded over five million tonnes of beet in the system this year, and that visibility is absolutely key to us, because we can then see this information and use it for more informed decision-making," he said.

He added: "I want to thank everybody involved in the industry - growers, harvesting, contractors, hauliers - because without them and their commitment to the industry and their tenacity through some of the tough times, we wouldn't have factories that are fully supplied, and the campaign wouldn't have gone as well as it has. So it's thanks to them, really."

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