Published by Farmers Guide, January 2006.

Breeding the sugar beet of the future

Farmers Guide reports from Germany where it joined a group of UK farmers as guests of the English Sugar Beet Company at the world headquarters of plant breeding giant KWS.

Based at Einbeck, about one hour's drive south of Hanover, plant breeder KWS appears quite at home in an area where about 25% of the land is planted to sugar beet each year; but the company's history reveals that it hasn't always been here.

In fact, KWS spent its first 90 years at Klein Wanzleben (from which it took its name), about 100 miles east of Einbeck. At the end of World War II, however, that town found itself in East Germany and the whole company moved - helped by the British authorities - to its current site.

KWS started as a sugar beet processing company in 1856 (it will celebrate its 150th anniversary this year) and quickly moved into breeding the crop as well. It expanded its breeding activities into cereals, fodder beet and potatoes in 1920 and, following the move to Einbeck, added maize breeding and the production of oil and protein crops in 1955.

Sugar beet has, however, remained central to the company's business and this got a massive boost in 1969 when the American subsidiary Betaseed Inc was formed.

Today, KWS is a massive concern with almost 800 staff at Einbeck and a total of 2,550 people in 65 countries around the world. Turnover in 2005 is estimated at £338 million, with sugar beet and maize contributing 44% of that each, cereals making up a further 11% and other crops contributing the final 1%.

As far as sugar beet is concerned, KWS is the worldwide market leader, claiming 35% of the 5,494,000ha grown in 2005. This includes a 64% market share of the 538,750ha grown in North America and 40.1% of the 2,200,000ha grown in the EU last year. Within Europe, the company claims a 57.3% market share (of 425,000ha) in its home country of Germany, while it has captured a 73% share (of 140,000ha) in the UK.

These sort of figures are not achieved by chance, and while marketing and promotion of the company's varieties in each country where they are sold has a role to play, there are two over-riding factors: variety performance and seed quality.

The KWS facility at Einbeck is responsible for ensuring that Europe's farmers not only have the best choice of varieties to meet their needs, but that any seed they buy is of the very best quality. The site houses an advanced seed storage and processing plant as well as the latest plant breeding technology and the highly qualified staff required to work there (about 100 of Einbeck's staff have a PhD).

There are about 70 dedicated staff in the seed processing plant. It is in operation for between four and six months from the end of July each year when the sugar beet seed starts arriving from Italy and France where it is grown. About 2,500ha is harvested for beet seed each year, yielding between 2,500-3,000kg/ha. The seed is cleaned and packaged in large cardboard containers to be shipped to Einbeck and between 5,000-6,000 tonnes arrive by lorry for processing every year.

The processing plant has a capacity of about two million units (one unit is a box of 100,000 seeds) each year and it is accepted that only about 20% of the seed delivered to Einbeck will become saleable seed. The first stage the raw seed goes through is calibration to sort it by size to allow for different degrees of polishing to end up with a uniform polished seed.

The processing plant can grade and polish up to 12,500 units/day, with the entire process between the forklift delivering a container of raw seed and taking away a pallet box of polished seed being computer controlled and overseen by just three staff on each shift.

The polished seed is then subjected to its first germination test and only if this is OK, (ideally 95% or more) does the seed go through to pelleting. Here the seed is coated in wood powder and dried to 8% moisture to produce a regular-sized product for planting. The pelleting plant at Einbeck can handle 8,500 units/day and once this process has been completed, the seed is again tested for germination.

It goes without saying that traceability in the seed plant is paramount, with every storage box clearly marked with a barcode at every stage to identify it and ensure that any samples that don't make the grade can be easily be found and removed.

Obviously KWS can't know in advance what orders it will receive for its seed each year, so the company produces much more than it expects to need so that its current varieties are always available. The excess seed, however, may not make it through the final two steps carried out in the seed plant. Only when seed has been ordered and any coating of insecticide and/or fungicide specified does the pelleted seed make it to the film coating line, and only then will it be packaged into one-unit boxes ready for shipping to the customer.

Sales of seed have a direct effect on the quest for new, improved varieties with KWS re-investing 15% of turnover each year in research and development. As far as sugar beet is concerned, this translates into 300,000 breeding plots (totalling 600ha) spread between 105 locations in 30 countries across the world.

The core breeding work is carried out at Einbeck, which boasts 9,000 square metres of glasshouses and the laboratory facilities - and staff - needed to produce unique varieties year after year. Not all of the new varieties will get the full investment of £1.7-3.4 million and 10-15 years required to bring them to market, but those that do are guaranteed to offer a commercial advantage in terms of yield or disease resistance.

Scientific developments have helped considerably in the breeding process and at KWS it is the company's Planta biotechnology and genetic engineering unit that assists the breeders in their day-to-day work.

Planta employs 100 staff and 25 of them are dedicated to DNA work, which has made the breeder's job much easier. By identifying the different genes in a variety and working out what the genes do, the scientists can very quickly tell if a new variety has the genes - and therefore the plant characteristics - that the breeder wants from a cross. Rather than having to grow the crop and wait and see if a plant has, for example, rhizomania resistance, a DNA test at an early stage can save a lot of time and money.

While Planta is helping the breeders speed up their traditional processes, it is also carrying out some genetic engineering work as well. It has nine years' experience in this field and its first commercial product - a herbicide tolerant sugar beet variety for the US only - is expected to be on sale from 2007/2008.

According to KWS sugar beet breeder Dr Günter Diener, the goals for breeding programmes are changing. In the past, the priorities were high yields, easier mechanisation and improved processing quality, but the future will see a shift to producing sugar beet for alternative uses - maybe bio-fuels - and novel resistances.

Currently about 47% of sugar beet varieties have no resistant characteristics, while 28% have resistance to one disease and 25% have resistance to multiple agents. By 2015, Dr Diener predicts that 45% of varieties will have multiple resistance with 33% single resistance and just 22% with no resistant qualities. Indeed, within 15 years he thinks that all varieties will be both Rhizomania and cyst nematode resistant.

Other areas the breeders are looking at include drought tolerance and post harvest losses - a subject of particular interest to the UK as it has the longest processing window in Europe.

Another project has been looking at the potential for minimise dirt tares by growing sugar beet on the surface, rather than buried in the soil, like the red table beet. At the moment KWS has managed to develop a surface-growing variety with a 12% sugar content, but this still lags far behind the 17% of conventional sugar beet. The programme is still running, but would be unlikely to survive any cost cuts within the R&D budget.

To carry out this sort of work requires an immense amount of genetic material and in the case of KWS there are about 3,000 separate genotypes which are maintained and used for plant breeding. Rather than being stored as seed, each genotype is cultivated in agar in a clear plastic dish and is stored in a walk-in fridge. Apart from needing to be moved to a new agar dish every six months, the genetic material remains available for the breeders to take samples which can be easily grown into plants for crossing.

The breeding programme at Einbeck is currently producing about 3,000 new breeding lines annually, of which about 10% are kept to develop into pure, homozygous lines for crossing. From all of this work, the breeders expect to get just eight or nine new hybrids each year.