When were the first beet harvesters used in Belgium?

Answer

I don’t have a very precise answer, but you can probably find it at the CAG (Center for Agricultural History, cagnet.be) or at agricultural museums in Kemmel or Beernem.

The first beet harvesting machines were built quite late. Harvesting was more difficult to mechanize than mowing and/or threshing. Otto Wilke, Heinrich Meisoll and Friedrich Bote built a prototype in 1927 in Lower Saxony, the cradle of sugar beet, which they patented in 1928. Commercialization did not follow until the mid-1936s, by firms such as Krupp and Lanz. The breakthrough happened mainly after the Second World War, so that by the beginning of the 1950s manual harvesting had largely disappeared. It was not until the 1970s that self-propelled harvesters were built. The machines were very often of German manufacture, initially mainly Stoll.