Choose Strube as your fodder-energy beet partner in 2026

Strube UK is pleased to offer three proven varieties for the fodder and energy beet markets in 2026.

The value of fodder beet in ruminant diets is well understood by livestock farmers and nutritionists. The highly digestible fibre in combination with the natural sugars in ‘beet provide an excellent feed that supports stable rumen pH and encourages dry matter intake for optimised daily liveweight gain or milk quality. 

This makes fodder beet an attractive and efficient feed stock for anaerobic digestion and biogas production.

Dietary or feed stock inclusion can easily exceed 6 months a year, from earlier harvested crops in October through to later lifted and well stored crops to March and beyond.

Our modern varieties offer a dry matter of around 19-21% and, using a seed rate of around 1.1-1.2 units per hectare can produce yields in excess of 100t/ha under UK conditions, 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. The use of organic manures can further reduce this requirement significantly.

Having a spring sown break crop may also bring benefits when planning farm rotation.

Varietal selection

In terms of our current varieties, for early planting on colder soils, ‘Clemens’ with the added benefit of seed priming advancement may be the variety of choice. For later planting ‘Degas’ and ‘Gahan’ have proven themselves for over recent years in the UK and Ireland, delivering exceptional performance. All three offer very low bolting levels. Growers can have great confidence in these varieties to deliver high fresh and dry matter yields,

Looking to the future, we have ‘Hubble’ and ‘ST Olympe’ in UK VL trialling with the objective of achieving national listing for 2027 cultivation. These have also been trialled independently in the UK and New Zealand and have demonstrated  higher yield potential for growers of fodder-energy beet.  

Seed treatment

All three of our fodder-energy beet varieties receive fungicide and insecticide treatment, as applied to UK sugar beet seed. This ensures excellent and uniform field emergence, high field establishment and vigorous early canopy development to maximise intercepted solar radiation for root yield development.

Our ‘3D+’ pellet technology has been proven for over a decade to deliver excellent performance and seed spacing and has been continuously developed in that time.

Looking to the future

Strube is renowned for delivering consistently high performing varieties from traditional breeding techniques, combined with excellence in seed quality. 

With RAGT’s recent acquisition of Strube, we now have greater capability arising from increased investment and resource into sugar beet breeding. The next 10 years will see further significant progress to support yield stability through resilient genetics from combinations of tolerance traits. This will be the direction of our candidate pipeline into trialling for national (now VL) listing and commercial reality; breeding progress together.