Potato Review

www.potatoreview.com POTATO REVIEW NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 27 HARVESTERS “We grow potatoes on a wide range of soils from stronger fen to some of the best silts in the country,” he said. “Our main chipping variety is Markies, then we have Performer, Sagitta and Agria but we’ll also try new varieties coming through from Agrico which are suited to di erent soil types and di erent storage temperatures. We use Performer for its PCN control. “It’s a good variety though it doesn’t suit all markets. Ireland in particular likes Markies and customers won’t change so it’s risky having too many options, and we’ve stopped growing Piper because fry colours deteriorated too quickly in store.” Changing the mix Until recently High yer Farms ran a mix of self-propelled and trailed harvesters but changes have been underway. “We’re currently running four Varitrons, the three new machines and a 2018 model. We have two Tectrons - a 2015 machine which was one of the last out of the factory and a 2013 which we have just sold. We took advantage of the weather market and moved one of the tracked machines on because growers using trailed harvesters have just not been able to get going. We also have a four-row Varitron on the way from Poland. It’s a one- year-old demonstrator which will be turned around and harvesting by the end of this week. “ e biggest di erence between the Tectrons and our three new Varitrons is obviously the number of rows we are lifting, though in some ways they are operating like for like. With the Platinum machines we’re loading two rows into a seven-tonne bunker, with the Tectrons it’s four rows into 14 tonnes. In dry conditions we use the Tectrons to load into lorries on the eld. e bulkers come in on a Bye Engineering power dolly, load up, get dropped back on the road and we can save about £2,000 a day on labour, fuel, and trailer movements. “We plan to replace both of them with four-row Varitron 470s to freshen the eet and we’ll also be going into parallel tracking, working closely with John Deere and Grimme. e idea is that you will literally press a button in the cab and the tractor and trailer will come to the harvester and run alongside. Within the next few weeks we should have the system on the farm to try it out. “John Deere is planning a new product launch shortly but we want it here now just to make sure it can work for us. Where we are currently using two Varitrons together we are lifting into Richard Larrington box trailers but we are having to stop and unload. Now, with reversing bunkers coupled with parallel tracking, we should be able to lose that minute and a half spent unloading and we will save a lot of time over a full day’s harvesting. “Stopping to unload gives the sta a break from picking o but, to be honest, the job is not too onerous on these latest machines so we could have a massive uplift in output, especially if we can guarantee that trailers are going to run alongside with all the potential errors out of the way. at’s one of the reasons why we’ve gone away from using trailed harvesters with elevators getting damaged.” If parallel tracking delivers on its promise, Andrew is hoping to use the system to allow loading on the move direct into lorries from the four-row Varitrons. ➜ “With reversing bunkers coupled with parallel tracking, we should be able to lose that minute and a half spent unloading and we will save a lot of time over a full day’s harvesting.” Andrew Lee with one of Highflyer Farms’ new Grimme Varitrons.