CULTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY Inhibiting sprouts with ethylene is simple, safe and harmless Examples of information on the display are the ethylene percentage in the store, the set ethylene percentage, the number of days that the unit operates and the temperature in the store, says Noteboom. The store manager need not know more. in trade journals, asking around at the Nedato cooperative, with the potato buyer from Oud-Beijerland, and by sizing up the situation with users in Great Britain who had been using it since its inception. ‘I only want to use sprout inhibitors on my farm that don’t leave harmful residues behind. I must also be able to store planting material or sowing seed in my new store. Moreover, I don’t wish any residues on my potatoes, or any visible harm to occur. My colleague Jan Blok – with whom I work – and I store the table potatoes here that are destined for the exclusive Pommonde packaging of Albert Heijn. These must look absolutely perfect and may not show anything unattractive such as skin irritation.’ British technology From the Nedato people, Noteboom heard that they had been A monitoring unit with a sensor in the storeroom monitors the ethylene concentration. ‘I only want to use sprout inhibitors on my farm that don’t leave harmful residues behind. ’ is Noteboom’s demand says Peter Noteboom. That’s why he changed over to ethylene. using ethylene for some years now with positive results and that they had also heard of good user results in Great Britain on a few occasions. Nedato director, Wim van de Ree, who was visiting Noteboom’s farm, explained what information he had needed to convince the crop farmer. ‘The developer of the unit is Greenvale, a Scottish potato trading company. They marketed the device under the name of Restrain with the help of Dirk Garos from the Dutch town of Breda. Greenvale had already started testing ethylene as a sprout inhibitor for potatoes back in the nineties, and for the same reason that Noteboom has opted for this method now: it leaves no residue on the product in storage. You can make ethylene from alcohol, but it is also a natural hormone in fruit such as apples, which is released after maturation and rotting. In the old days there were already people who knew that apples and potatoes were good friends when stored together in the cellar. The potatoes would sprout less fast. If you want to store a large lot of potatoes for as long as possible without sprouting, you need to be highly accurate in determining the dosage. How accurate that dosage needs to be, that is something that Greenvale is keeping a secret and uses for their own marketing strategy after all those years of research. Whatever that secret may be, we at Nedato have followed the results of the ethylene application at some British companies for some years now and we are convinced that it works perfectly well. Anyway, British companies are clearly changing their minds now because 30 percent of British companies are already using ethylene as a sprout inhibitor for potatoes. In Oud-Beijerland, we have been using ethylene for three consecutive seasons now. We first also had doubts and questions about Dirk Garos’ story. And then, one day, a man appeared with a unit who said: put this plug in the socket and that’s all you need to do, except when the orange light is on, because that means that you need to fill up with a few litres of alcohol. Well, you don’t believe that straightaway, do you? Substantial ‘after-sprouting’ requires moving fast ‘What we have seen in practice for a few years now is that the unit can, indeed, keep a store with potatoes free from sprout24 Potato World 2009 • number 2 Pagina 23
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