Potato Review

www.potatoreview.com POTATO REVIEW SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019 35 ORGANICS the years I have been growing potatoes I have seen a lot more money lost through poor weed control,” he said. “I’ve seen disasters with blight but you will lose a lot more by not doing the weeding. “People often have the impression that potatoes control weeds but they don’t – they allow you to control the weeds but you still have to do the work. Potatoes grow in nice, neat rows which are relatively easy to weed compared with cereals but if those weeds are not controlled they will take 50% of the potential out of the crop. Fat hen, for example, will remove a huge amount of moisture and fertility out of the ground. If it’s just smaller grass weeds then potatoes may well get on top of the problem but spending another £50 an acre on a gas burner is usually money well spent. We generally use one to control growth on the tops of the drills but it doesn’t tend to work so well in the bottoms so we also rely on mechanical weeding as a two-pronged attack. “Blight is getting more difficult to control,” Andrew said. “Organic regulations still permit the use of copper but there are no products currently registered here and I think that will increase the focus on resistant varieties. There are some very good ones but they’re not particularly what buyers want. We have the Sarpo varieties, for example, but they are all red and they have slightly higher dry matter than the mainstream market is looking for. We also have Bionica which has been grown on the Continent for a few years now and seems to have pretty good blight resistance.” Skea Organics survived the downturn and Andrew has no intentions of giving up on organic production. “We’re in it even deeper now with seed,” he said. “Up to 2008 we had about a third of the market but Agrico [Bioselect] is down to maybe 10% and Greenvale is not really growing organic seed now so we’ve got a much bigger share though it’s a smaller market.” ‘Not the way to feed the world’ One grower who preferred not to be named looked back on his experience of organic production with mixed feelings. He told Potato Review that a drop in demand coupled with the appearance of new aggressive blight strains had forced a major rethink and a return to conventional cropping. “We always got some blight with organic crops but in our last year we started to see tuber blight and that was probably the final nail in the coffin,” he recalled. “The market for organics was flying until the 2008/9 downturn when sales dropped on the back of the banking crash combined with the Lidl effect when supermarkets no longer wanted 20 different lines on their shelves. “We were being led by our packer and we were growing a cracking variety,” he added. “Crops weren’t forced at all and skin quality was never a huge issue but growing organically certainly teaches you that you need to be a bit more careful about weeds. It’s all coming back to me now – weed control was quite simple in our conventional crops by comparison but the lack of chemistry today means that we are having to look again at herbicides and some of the principles of organic production are coming to the fore.” Our grower does not hanker after growing potatoes organically and observes that it takes a big premium to make it all worthwhile. “It’s not the way to feed the world and the change for us came when supermarkets put their organic offerings back in the same aisle as conventional potatoes and you could almost pick them up by accident.” “I’ve seen disasters with blight but you will lose a lot more by not weeding. People often have the impression that potatoes control weeds.”