Earliest cultivation of sugar beet

How might the sugar beet have been developed earlier in history? It was developed as an alternative to sugarcane, so it would seem that experience with sugarcane would be necessary (though to anyone that can create a plausible scenario predating cane would get bonus points).

Just off the top of my head: When the main source of European sugar is in Islamic hands during the middle ages, some ambitious monks decide to attempt to breed a local alternative for Christians, and settle on the beet.
 
I would give it a higher probability than early posters- while it was certainly the result of scientific breeding, scientific breeding is rather unique in having few prerequisites- you don't have to understand how it works to do it, and people often didn't. At the dawn of modern scientific breeding, there were actually a few experimentalists who started from scratch (wild samples) and got domesticable crops in only a few generations. Now, figuring out how to refine it may take a while, and the early inventors may well be different than the early adopters.
 
How might the sugar beet have been developed earlier in history? It was developed as an alternative to sugarcane, so it would seem that experience with sugarcane would be necessary (though to anyone that can create a plausible scenario predating cane would get bonus points).

Just off the top of my head: When the main source of European sugar is in Islamic hands during the middle ages, some ambitious monks decide to attempt to breed a local alternative for Christians, and settle on the beet.

As the OTL development of the sugar beet happened to a major extend due to lack of canesugar during the Napoleonic wars have some other period where the Europens don't have acces and they'd go on developing.
 
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