Waldersey Farms is steadily increasing its potato acreage, also after Brexit CU LTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY Waldersey Farms gets water for irrigation partly from its own source, the large basin that it had constructed in 1996 for an amount of 365,000 pounds (about 400,000 euros). potatoes, we still import 40 percent of the total required volume. We can and will do something about that, but who knows what will happen in terms of inflation and any further devaluation of the British pound?’ Polish workers are leaving A little later, he mentions another Brexit problem: labour. Waldersey has also been working with Polish seasonal workers for years. ‘Now that the pound has devalued, they’re taking stock and seeing that they now earn less in the UK than in Europe. So they are leaving. That forces us to mechanise. And if you want to scale up in farm mechanisation, you’ll definitely sometimes need equipment and tools from Europe. They’ve also become more expensive, and then we’re double losers. Hopefully in about five years’ time, the dust will have settled a little and a decent system of subsidies will have been set up in our own country. However, we’re not sure yet that that will happen’, he says grimly. The highest yield this year for Maris Piper The director is a lot more cheerful when he can talk again about his favourite subject: potatoes. ‘In order to cultivate potatoes at Waldersey it’s important to do it on the best soils, as free from weeds as possible and free from soil-bound pests and diseases such as nematodes’, he says with a returning enthusiasm. ‘The crop rotation is ample and we want to keep it that way. We’re also cautious when it comes to cultivating newly-purchased land. If we have to wait 12 years for it to be suitable for potato cultivation, we’ll wait 12 years.’ In the early years, Waldersey mainly cultivated the Maris Piper variety primarily as a table potato. With the rise of the processing industry, the fish and chip shops in their own country, Waldersey decided to switch to growing French-fry potatoes and started growing the Maris Piper for this purpose too. As higher-yielding varieties were then introduced to the market, varieties such as Agria, Marquis, Ramos, Royal, Cabaret and Performer were grown as well. In the last 10 years, the proportion of Maris Piper has Over the past 10 years, the Maris Piper part of the cropping plan, which is put into boxes here, has dropped from 60 to 5 percent. Director Robert Loxton isn’t very happy about that this year, because the traditional British variety achieved the highest yield of all the varieties grown this season. Potato World 2019 • number 1 31 Pagina 30

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