Tarlton Beetroot Business Plan — Operating Model: Agronomy and Production

Land preparation, planting schedule, irrigation and the agronomic programme behind yield per hectare.

Section 13 of 37

Operating Model: Agronomy and Production

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A staggered planting programme built around the Highveld frost window, delivering harvest in every month except the deep winter gap.

Agronomy

Table 19 Production parameters

Parameter	Specification	Rationale
Cultivars	Detroit Dark Red types, Crimson Globe and hybrid equivalents	Established South African performance; Crimson Globe types are documented at yields above 55 tonnes per hectare under good management
Plant population	Approximately 500,000 to 600,000 plants per hectare	Rows at 20 cm, in-row spacing 5 to 10 cm depending on target beet diameter
Establishment	Direct-seeded with a two-row precision vacuum seeder	Transplanting is uneconomic at commercial density
Days to maturity	90 to 110 days for a 60–70 mm beet; 60 to 70 days for baby beet	Modelled as a three-month lag for October to March sowings and four months for the cooler April to September sowings
Irrigation	Drip with fertigation	Water use efficiency and precise nutrient placement; also allows fertigation of boron
Nutrition	Balanced NPK with deliberate boron correction	Boron deficiency causes internal black spot, which is invisible externally and rejected at the pack line — a specific and common failure in South African beetroot
Rotation	Minimum one-in-three	Manages Rhizoctonia, Cercospora leaf spot and root-knot nematode
Planting window	August to April, thin from May to July	Highveld frost from June to August suppresses growth; the seasonal yield index falls to 0.82 in July

Figure 1. Monthly hectares planted and harvested across the plan horizon.

The planting programme is deliberately staggered into sub-blocks rather than planted as single large flushes. On the one-hectare Phase 1 site this means six to eight sub-blocks of 0.30 to 0.35 hectares. The purpose is not agronomic but commercial: a buyer cannot be supplied weekly by a grower who harvests twice a year. Cropping intensity is 1.95 hectare-cycles in Year 1 rising to approximately 2.05 to 2.15 thereafter, which is realistic given land preparation time between cycles.

Table 20 Production build-out

	Year 1 FY2028	Year 2 FY2029	Year 3 FY2030	Year 4 FY2031	Year 5 FY2032
Beetroot hectare-cycles harvested	1.9	6.7	12.9	34.5	41.0
Achieved yield (t per hectare-cycle)	38.2	44.0	49.0	51.0	54.0
Gross tonnage harvested	75	293	632	1 758	2 215
Field and pack-out loss	16%	13%	11%	9%	8%
Marketable tonnes	63	255	562	1 600	2 037
Rotation hectare-cycles	0	0	5	34	52

Figure 2. Cropped area and beetroot tonnage by year.

Labour

Beetroot is labour-intensive at both ends of the cycle. Establishment requires thinning and hand weeding because the crop competes poorly early, and harvest is by hand lifting and topping — mechanical harvest is not economic at this scale and damages the product for the fresh market. Field labour is budgeted at R26,500 per hectare-cycle in FY2028 terms, roughly 31 per cent of the field cost stack and the largest single line. At Year 5 the operation requires approximately 34 permanent and 40 to 55 seasonal positions, with the seasonal peak falling between November and February.