CU LTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY Waldersey Farms is steadily increasing its potato acreage, also after Brexit L arge clouds of dust accompany the two-row Dewulf bunker harvester when it lifts one of the first Agria plots for Waldersey Farms near Downham Market in the 2018 season. The harvest is a few weeks behind, due to the fact that it took the tubers some time to get their firm skins. So far, 200 acres (80 hectares) of potatoes of the total 840 acres (336 hectares) of the large arable farm have been harvested. ‘Normally, we finish harvesting at the end of October, but we won’t make it this year. It’s now going to be mid-November’, says director Robert Loxton, on site. Although the dust may suggest otherwise, the soil is not as dry as it seems from a distance. The tubers that pass by on the sieving webs clearly show that there is still some black soil clinging to them. When, on the plot, Loxton personally lifts a few tubers with a potato digging fork, you can feel that they are still a bit damp. The moisture is due to a downpour in the week before they started harvesting. Ditches and canals What is also striking, is that the tubers aren’t very big. ‘We haven’t irrigated this plot, because we still don’t have enough water available. And this plot is part of the better moisture-holding soils. We’d also like to start irrigating here, but we need even more water for that. We have plenty of ditches and canals here, that’s not the problem.’ Ditches and canals in England? Yes, Waldersey Farms works in a typical Dutch lookalike countryside. This is thanks to Sir Cornelis Vermuyden, a Dutchman from Sint Maartensdijk who was raised to the British peerage, Loxton explains. This hydraulic engineer was commissioned by English leading residents around the year 1630 to reclaim The Fens area. A peaty area with a surface of nearly 400,000 hectares, located on the east coast of central England and known for cities such as Cambridge, Boston, Peterborough and Lincoln. Before Vermuyden started working here, he’d already achieved considerable successes with dikes in the Dutch province of Zeeland and had carried out an important assignment for the English Court, namely the construction of a dike on the Thames, which also caused the gardens of Windsor Castle to dry out. Own water basin ‘Normally, we finish harvesting at the end of October, but we won’t make it this year. |It will be mid-November’, says director Robert Loxton The many thousands of kilometres of long, dead-straight ditches and canals with their associated pumping stations are mainly used to drain excess rainwater from the area. Since the arrival of irrigation equipment, farmers in The Fens are also getting fresh water from the watercourses. But for dry periods such as last summer, compared to the rest of Northwest Europe, this is not nearly enough. However, many years ago, Waldersey Farms built a large water collection basin with a storage capacity of 102 million gallons, which corresponds to 463 million litres. With this basin, the 28 Potato World 2019 • number 1 Pagina 27
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