Vervaet is a Dutch manufacturer of self-propelled, jumbo-sized agricultural machinery. Their Beet Eaters, one of the best model names in the agri-business, eat beets and roots from underneath the surface without digesting them after swallowing. These machines harvest mostly sugar beets, but also fodder beets, chicory roots and celery roots.
The harvester is rear-engined. The power unit is a 510 hp, 12.9 liter DAF inline-six turbodiesel.
This is a command center rather than just a cab. Note that the juggernaut is road-legal.
Hydraulic all-wheel drive and all-wheel steering. The rear wheels roll exactly between the tracks of the front wheels.
Yet a lawn improver it isn’t.
The Beet Eater’s mouth, here’s where the harvesting process starts.
The beets or roots are transported all the way to the center of the harvester.
Right to this point, on the left side.
Then upstairs to what’s called the bunker. It has 25 metric tons capacity, around 40 m³ (1,413 ft³) of product. The unloading time of a full bunker is 50 seconds.
Van der Woerd, an agricultural contractor, is the owner of this Beet Eater. Woerd is Dutch for a male duck, so that explains the logo.
When a farm tractor with a trailer drives alongside the harvester, it is loaded from here.
What a fascinating and impressive piece of equipment!
I found this splendid video on YouTube, featuring Van der Woerd’s Beet Eater at the job, somewhere in Flevoland. Once a major part of an inland sea, then turned into very fertile land in the 20th century. Fairly New Holland, so to speak.
And here are some end products of the yearly Beets Campaign, this year’s season starts on the 6th of September. Beet Eaters, start your engines!
On a related note, around 28 of these can be made from one sugar beet.
What a fascinating machine! You’ve put me in mind of this from my childhood. The guy at the end looks like his teeth aren’t very good, for some strange reason.
Earworm alert!
It is kind of a Woerd machine as are many of these agricultural implements but it seems to beet, oops, beat doing the work by hand. Another very sweet find, JD!
I can’t seem to find an image online, but I think that for a while in years past, Colorado license plates had a silhouette of a sugar beet.
Living in farming country myself, I’m used to seeing huge tractors and other weird agricultural machinery I can’t put a name to drive through town, but this one is really Woerd. Sugar beets aren’t a thing in my country (ours comes from cane), so I really appreciated your photos and explanation of how the harvester works. Hartelijk dank Johannes!
See, you have country manners. Whereas all I can think is that in Aus it would undoubtedly be named The Big Rooter.
Graag gedaan, Oude Piet!
The tractorspotter YouTube channel has lots of videos featuring mainly Dutch agriculture, including tillage, planting and harvesting using wonderful specialized machines. Great drone work also.
Wonderful stuff.
Looks like the product of a clever sci-fi filmmaker (The Beeteaters Of Planet Zog – you can run, and they can’t hide. Or something). Instead, it is elaborately functional.
Still, I’m sure that if the hydraulics are connected the right way it can also play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue for Organ to wind down at the end of a shift.
Wow, amazing machine! Another new one for me…thanks Johannes. Jim.
I am fascinated by what crops are grown where. When I was a kid there was an abandoned sugar beet processing facility in northwest Ohio where my mother grew up. Perhaps it was a wartime effort to expand sugar production, but I can never recall seeing a sugar beet field anywhere around here. Corn and soybeans are the only two things grown here with any frequency. There is the occasional alfalfa field, but that’s about it.
I am also awed by how folks have mechanized tasks like this. Machinery like this takes care of corn and soybean harvests around here.
Nearby, they’re working on 2D-fruit trees. What follows is a fully mechanized plucking process.
Some really talented people invented and improved this machine. Wonderful to see. Given all the hydraulics and moving parts, especially those in continuous ground contact, I expect that a full time person is needed just for preventive maintenance.
The history of the Vervaet self-propelled beet harvesters goes back to 1974. Among contractors, the company’s harvesters are highly praised for their simplicity (go figure).
A new Beet Eater 625 starts at € 515,000. These days with a bigger and more powerful Mercedes-Benz engine in the back.
Large contractors buy a new one. At some point, they often go back to the factory for a complete overhaul, a new paint job included. Smaller contractors or a group of farmers buy used.
An interesting series of pictures (visiting the factory) can be found here:
https://agrifoto.nl/nieuws/log/4620
Some other manuafacturers of comparable harvesters are Grimme, Holmer and Ropa (all from Germany).
Neat! Sugar beet country doesn’t start in my state until you go about 2 hours north of where I’m at, but even there, I don’t think you’d see many such machines, as those farmers haven’t jumped on the self-propelled sugar beet harvester bandwagon for the most part. Despite every other cash crop in most of the US now using self-propelled harvesters almost exclusively, it seems sugar beet farmers are still perfectly content using pull-type machines.
Still a mixture here (and in the rest of Europe) of self-propelled and pull-type beet harvesters.
For example, Grimme (see comment above) offers them both. Like a massive self-propelled machine with a 30 tons bunker and their pull-type Rootster, see below, with a 4 tons bunker.
On a much larger scale, this reminds me of the tomato harvester my dad bought in the mid-’70’s.
I don’t recall the manufacturer, but it was well-used, so Dad got it for a very low price. It was powered by a 225 ci Chrysler slant 6. He tuned it up, bought a new wooden slatted shaker belt for it (which looked much like the one on the beet harvester), and put it to work.