As tractors grow in horsepower, so there is a natural desire on the part of the farmer who has bought a bigger tractor to use the extra horsepower now available.

Whilst it is sometimes possible to drive his tractor faster when at work, this is not always a good idea when there is a harvester on the back. There is an optimum harvesting forward speed, depending upon conditions, and little is served in trying to exceed that speed.

The answer is to add width, as for example adding an extra row to a sugar beet harvester. The drift of labour from the land has been continuous since the mid-1800's, and as labour shortages appear, so fewer machines can be operated.

The easy answer is to use two machines where previously one used three. It would not be unreasonable for a sugar beet grower using three single row harvesters to obtain the same output from two 2-row harvesters.

Inclement weather puts many farming operations under stress, and late harvests that stretch into the middle of winter are a powerful argument for a farmer to upgrade his machinery so he can harvest more at the time of the year when conditions are right.

After a while it is human nature to look for something better than what one has. This applies as much to farm machinery as cars, hi-fi systems or holidays.

The logical conclusion was the development of Standen 2 row harvesters, the first of which was the Beet Twin.

It was not possible to incorporate a holding-tank on this model as the overall weight would have been too much for the 60 HP tractors which were generally the largest on the farm at that time. The picture shows that the twin topping unit was offset, so two rows were topped ahead of the two rows being lifted. This could make for a problem at the end of the day, especially if hard frosts were expected overnight.

The exposed top was vulnerable to damage, and should continuation of the harvest be delayed for whatever reason beet could be lost.

So this was quite a cumbersome system, made more so by the need to run a trailer alongside the harvester to collect the lifted beet. This reintroduced the need for extra people, to drive the trailers, which explains why this type of two row machine was never likely to be popular. Very few Beet Twins were manufactured, being in most ways less appealing than the self-propelled Solobeet, which was introduced at the same time.

Early prototype 2-row self-propelled sugar beet harvester

It was decided not to develop this concept further. Part of the reason was that it was rather complicated, with a particularly awkward arrangement for the front-mounted offset topper.

Its genesis was with the boffins at Silsoe, the agricultural research institute near Bedford, whom the company had commissioned to come up with a design that would meet certain criteria. After testing and pre-production model production, it was clear to Standen that what they had come up with suffered too many drawbacks to be worth continuing with, or a complete re-design was required.

Paradoxically the Talisman became quite a sought-after second-hand machine.

As readers may have already concluded, Standen had not achieved very much in their attempts to establish a 2-row harvester. But the market was there, there was no doubt about that, and in 1984 Standen finally produced a harvester which caught the imagination of the sugar beet grower.

This was the self-propelled 2-row Tornado. Based on the Cyclone, this off-set machine used a variety of tractor skid units as a power source, these being demountable should the farmer wish to use them as a normal tractor once the harvest was finished.

The Tornado continued in production for several years, but its cost and its relatively small tank meant that production volumes sank to single figures, where it no longer became economic to continue with this model. The drier harvests being experienced in the early 90's also reduced the requirement for the "mud-plugging" performance that the Tornado could achieve.

In 1990 Standen solved its own problem (the lack of a 2-row harvester) by linking with the Danish company Thyregod, who manufactured both a 2-row and a 3-row trailed harvester, which in the hands of Standen Engineering rapidly became the market leader.

Over one hundred of these fine harvesters were sold, the popularity of the 2-row being replaced by the move to 3-row models.

Unfortunately, for marketing reasons beyond the control of Standen, the Thyregod franchise was removed in 2001, and the long and very successful association between Thryegod and Standen came to an abrupt end.