Our goal at SESVanderHave is to commercialise sugar beet varieties that meet the farmers’ needs. To do so, we analyse the market so that we don’t just develop varieties that meet your current needs, but your future needs as well.
Nowadays, agriculture faces huge challenges:
- Continuously growing world population
- Increased food production, food security and energy as competing critical demands
- Complexity of land, energy and water use
- Climate change
- Stricter legislation on the use of plant protection, plant nutrition and genetic technologies
- The need to reconcile a more sustainable agriculture with the pressure to guarantee food supply (captured in the Farm-to-Fork strategy and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union, or the US Farm Bill)
To make this agro-ecological transition happen, at SESVanderHave we integrate these competing needs into our R&D pipeline to design and deliver new sugar beet varieties, tested extensively in dedicated field trial platforms to verify natural field performance. We continuously invest to keep our R&D capacity not only at the forefront of our industry, but also to ensure it is in tune and anticipating such trends. State-of-the-art breeding technologies, big data analyses, bioinformatics, use of remote sensing technologies and good, old fashioned field work are key.
Find out more about our breeding activities that help us tackle the challenges beet growers might encounter!
Tropical beet
Tropical sugar beets are extra resistant to extreme conditions such as drought, temperature, heavy rainfall and exotic diseases. Thanks to our research and trials in tropical conditions, SESVanderHave has been able to develop varieties with the capacity to adapt to extreme conditions, even if not tropical.