KWS Innovations and American Crystal Sugar Company recently announced that American Crystal has signed a multi-year agreement to purchase and utilize the Beetrometer F400 equipment for use in the company’s central tare lab.
Cory Kritzberger, American Crystal’s ag operations manager, is looking forward to the potential efficiency savings that will be made possible from this technology.
“We have worked closely with American Crystal for over three years as they sought to upgrade their quality lab equipment,” says Duane Bernhardson, business development manager at KWS. “It has been an excellent, collaborative project.”
The device, which goes by the name KWS Beetrometer F400, chops beets into small, uniform, same-sized pieces. These pieces are then transported under a near-infrared spectrometer (NIRS). The NIRS emits a specific wavelength of light onto the surface of the freshly chopped beets, which absorbs some of the light and reflects some of the light back to the unit. The amount of light and the wavelengths reflected depend on the sugar content of the beets being examined, and the Beetrometer uses the measure of reflected light to calculate the sample’s sugar content.
“In use for over 10 years for the breeding of sugarbeet hybrids, KWS has developed and applied this technology for use in the sugarbeet processing industry,” says Bernhardson. “With over 5 million samples analyzed, the Beetrometer is an established, reliable tool for analyzing the recoverable sugar content of sugarbeets.”
The benefits to the Beetrometer are numerous:
- Simple, easy-to-use technology
- Results available in a matter of seconds
- Repeatable results ensuring measurement consistency, accuracy and reliability
- Automation that reduces the temporary, skilled labor needed to operate tare laboratories
- Elimination of the need to produce brei samples, which in turn eliminates the need for testing chemicals