Sugar Beet Collectors/Farming Simulator 17
A Sugar Beet Collector is a special Vehicle in Farming Simulator 17 whose only purpose is to pick up Sugar Beets from Piles on the ground. It is essentially a self-propelled system of Conveyor Belts with a pick-up header at the front. It can continuously pick up more and more Beets as long as it has somewhere to drop them.
This vehicle can be used in several different ways, but mainly it can assist greatly during the Sugar Beet harvest. You can simply dump all of the Sugar Beets you collect in a big pile right on the field, and then later use the Sugar Beet Collector to pick them up again and put them into containers. This is much faster than shuttling Sugar Beets to another location while the harvest is still in progress.
Farming Simulator 17 offers two models of Sugar Beet Collector - the Holmer Exxact Terra Felis 2 eco and Ropa Maus 5.
Sugar Beet Collectors are in direct competition with much simpler loading tools, such as a Wheel Loader with a shovel, or a set of Conveyor Belts. It is far more expensive than such tools, but its greatest advantage is easy mobility and ease of use - requiring minimal work to load massive quantities of Sugar Beets.
List of Sugar Beet Collectors
Farming Simulator 17 introduced the first sugar beet collector - the Holmer Terra Felis 2 eco. Ropa DLC added one new sugar beet collector - the Ropa Maus 5.
| Name | Price | Maint. Cost per Day |
Horsepower | Max. Speed (km/h) |
Fuel Capacity |
Crop Capacity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Holmer Exxact Terra Felis 2 eco | 325,000 | 1,490 | 354 | 40 | 1,400 | 3,000 |
| Ropa Maus 5 | TBA | TBA | TBA | TBA | TBA | TBA |
Collecting Sugar Beets
Harvesting a single unfertilized hectare of Sugar Beets produces a whopping 57,800 liters of crop. For one, this means that a Sugar Beet harvester needs to be unloaded very often in order to keep working. Complicating the matter, the Sugar Beets cannot be stored in a normal Silo.
A good option for handling all of this crop is to simply dump it on the ground during the harvest - either out of the harvester itself, or out of whatever container it offloads into. The Sugar Beets are dumped in a big Pile, and the harvester can keep working unimpeded.
However, at the end of the harvest you are probably going to want to get the Sugar Beets from the pile and move them somewhere else - whether to sell or to store elsewhere. A Sugar Beet Collector is a tool designed explicitly for this purpose: It can pick up massive amounts of Sugar Beets from the pile with minimal effort, and dump them directly into a Tipper container, or onto a Conveyor Belt system.
At the front of the Sugar Beet Collector is a large engine-powered scoop that will suck in any Sugar Beet Pile it comes into contact with. The Sugar Beets are then moved up through the machine, using a long conveyor belt.
At the end of the belt is a nozzle that can dump the beets into a container, if it finds one. If you move a suitable container underneath the nozzle, the machine will continuously suck in more Sugar Beets and dump them into the container, until either the container is full or the Sugar Beet Pile has been emptied.
The conveyor belt of the Sugar Beet Collector is fully articulated - you can use three different controls to rotate different sections of the belt, and put the nozzle anywhere you want. If you line up several containers, the Sugar Beet Collector can move its nozzle over each of them in turn, filling them one by one - without having to move the containers at all.
In this way, you can fill up several containers very rapidly with Sugar Beets and carry them to anywhere you need them.
Note: The Sugar Beet Collector itself can suck in 3,000 Liters of Sugar Beets without dumping them. You can then move it elsewhere and dump the Sugar Beets there (into a container or on the ground). This is an inefficient way to move Sugar Beets, but it might come in handy in certain situations. Also note that you can fold the Collector while it's carrying Sugar Beets this way - they won't fall out.
Comparison with Other Tools
A Sugar Beet Collector is not the only type of machine that can collect Sugar Beets off the ground; It is in competition with several other tools that could also handle this job - but each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
- Loaders equipped with a Bucket can scoop Sugar Beets off the ground and dump them into a container. These tools are exceptionally cheap, and useful for many other jobs too. On the other hand, you have to move the beets one scoop at a time, and buckets have a very limited capacity. Consider using a Wheel Loader with a Magsi Universal Shovel for this job, since it can scoop up a much larger quantity each time.
- Conveyor Belts are also exceptionally cheap. Like Sugar Beet Collectors, a Conveyor Belt system can transfer an entire pile of Sugar Beets into containers very rapidly and with little work. On the other hand, setting up the conveyor belt system is tricky (and oftentimes frustrating), and moving it from place to place is not simple at all.
- Sugar Beet Collectors are both very quick to finish the job, and can be moved from place to place easily and rapidly with no hassle. The conveyor system of a Collector machine is also very handy and easy to use. Of course, all of this comes at a price, with Sugar Beet Collectors being very expensive machines.