Potatoes and beets Farm Expert 2017 Guide

Last update: 11 January 2017

Cultivating potatoes and beetroots is very similar to cultivating cereals. Plough, cultivate, and then plant the potatoes/beets.

Planting potatoes is pretty expensive for a beginning farm, since you need potato planting machinery for some 40,000 euro. You can resort to manual planting - employing a worker to do that costs only a couple hundred euro.

As it turns out, harvesting potatoes and beets is also rather profitable if you use the worker. The cheapest beet combine costs 90,000 euro, and the cheapest potato digger is about 30,000 euro. The hardware is pretty expensive - you can't make potatoes and beets your first investment, because you simply won't be able to afford it - the profits are also not tremendous.

Potatoes will give around 1000 euro per ton, and the beets as much as 630 euro per ton, which isn't impressive, and renders the point of raising these crops rather shaky. You can make better money raising rape and soy. Sugar beets are worth even less than wheat and barley. The opportunity to obtain additional fodder for animals if you collect the beets with a combine worth 500,000 euro is also not really convincing.

Of course, we have to note than one hectare of potatoes or beets will yield around 15% more crops (in tones). This, however, still doesn't make it worthwhile. These are good as an addition, not the main target.