Plant breeder Strube is offering three varieties for the UK fodder and energy beet markets for 2026: Clemens, Degas and Gahan. For early planting and on colder soils, Clemens comes with the added benefit of seed priming advancement; although Degas and Gahan have consistently proved themselves over the past four years, delivering exceptional performance.
Bred for all-round performance, all three varieties are ‘low bolting’ and suitable for sowing from mid-March onwards, says Strube. Fodder beet offers a highly valuable constituent in ruminant diets, it adds.
Dietary inclusion from fodder beet when fed to livestock can easily exceed six months annually, ranging from early harvested crops in October to later lifted and well stored crops in March and beyond.
The combination of highly digestible fibre with natural sugars in beet provide a feed that supports stability of rumen pH and in turn encourages dry matter intake for optimised daily liveweight gain or milk quality, says Strube UK director Rochard Cogman.
Strube varieties offer 19-21% dry matter. Combined with a seed rate of 1.1-1.2 units per hectare (110-120K seeds) they can yield more than 100t/ha under UK conditions in well managed crops, equivalent to c.20 t/ha dry matter or more.
All of this can be grown using no more than 120kg of applied nitrogen per hectare, making for a very nitrogen efficient crop. When grown in combination with the use of organic manures, this rate can be reduced accordingly.
A spring sown break crop such as fodder beet may bring additional benefits when planning farm rotation to help with the management of other agronomic challenges, such as pernicious grass weeds.
“Our fodder beet seed is treated with the same fungicide and insecticide treatments as applied to UK sugar beet seed,” says Mr Cogman. “These in combination with excellence in our seed quality and vigour ensure rapid, uniform emergence, high field establishment and early canopy development to maximise intercepted solar radiation that is essential for root yield optimisation.”