I've no experience of sugarbeet, but potatoes can vary massively in terms of season, so the vast majority of farmers will err towards buying machinery which is better suited to a variety of conditions (wet and sticky conditions through dry and light).Bryan83 wrote: ↑Sat Jan 23, 2021 7:56 pm ^^^^^
What I find funny as an outsider to real farming, is you have a 12 row beet harvester, but all the potato equipment is very narrow, yet both machines do almost the same task. That is, they both have to literally dig the crop out of the ground. The only thing I can think of would be that maybe the potato harvester has to dig deeper, and therefore more of the available horsepower has to be translated in depth over width?
Obviously the heavier the soil, the harder it is to lift them, though I don't think its about power as such, more about using equipment and settings which lead to having more chance of an acceptable quality of the end product.
It wasn't that long ago (~25 years) that the better potato farms were checking and harvesting by hand. Thus far machinery still hasn't been able to catch up in terms of absolute quality.