CULTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY matic A In order to transport all 8,400 boxes into their storehouse, Jaap and Hans de Zeeuw from the Northeast Polder assisted in the development of, and invested in the automatic box filler: No. 1 BoxFilr of Van Hees Machinery. ‘Because we lift two boxes at the same time with the forklift truck,, we can stack much more neatly. And the driver has a much easier workload’, an enthusiastic Jaap de Zeeuw tells us. s soon as the Beco trailer rotates in front of the receiving hopper and unloads the Agria seed variety, the loading and unloading line at seed potato grower De Zeeuw starts running. The new box filler stands out immediately. This machine fills 80 to 85 cubic metre boxes per hour. Each box contains 1,250 kilograms of seed potatoes. The machine is special because it fills the boxes uniformly. It does this because it is equipped with an intelligent weighing and registration which ensures that the boxes are always filled to the set weight, whether the bunker is soiled or not. The registration system sees to it that De Zeeuw can keep track of how many boxes have been filled and with exactly how much. To fill the boxes, Van Hees Machinery has developed an intelligent and innovative bunker system. With the aid of roller lanes and a lift, the empty box is shifted under the filler opening of the machine. In the meantime, the machine fills the bunker with 1,250 kilograms of potatoes. Once the box is in its place and the weight has been reached, the machine accurately fills the box, almost without any drop height or pile formation. This has a positively impact on the storage process and this routine takes about four seconds. ‘This works really well, says De Zeeuw. In the next step, the box is shifted to the last station, where the stacker lifts the full box up. As soon as the next box is full, De Zeeuw has two full boxes to take to the storehouse. ‘Things are so much calmer now. We chose the BoxFilr because that machine has developed its own grip system that can stack the boxes extremely accurately. Because of this we can move two boxes at the same time and stack the boxes much more neatly in the storage unit’, according to De Zeeuw. The brothers grow 210 hectares of seed of seventeen different varieties every year, which all go into storage. They also fill three thousand boxes of onions every year, for which they use the same machine. ‘The trailers are emptied quickly, because during the onion harvest, we had peaks of 120 boxes per hour, and still with only one forklift truck driver. If you want to invest in such a costly machine, you need to use it throughout the year’, says De Zeeuw frankly. ‘The investment is too high to only use the machine during the harvest, which is why the box filler has a modular construction. With a change in the setup, we can automatically rotate and empty the boxes with the aid of the stackers. We then use the stand-alone filler with the grading machine. The result is that one man can process four hundred to five hundred boxes a day’, comments De Zeeuw. ● Jaap Delleman Potato World 2015 • number 1 27 Pagina 26
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