REPORT Ron Frew lifts his potatoes after they have ripened on demand. The table potato yield is approximately 60 tons per hectare. All small packaging companies use the Wyma Veg polisher dollars a year to fellow-farmers who use it for other crops. He does this to keep the crop rotation as broad as possible. Careful with nitrogen appl ications The growing period for table potatoes is short. Frew can already start killing the potato foliage ninety days after planting. This means that he is very careful with nitrogen applications. ‘I grow potatoes and not potato foliage, you see’ , he explains. The table potato yield is approximately 60 tons per hectare. Frew lifts his potatoes after they have ripened according to demand. His customers tell him every day how many potatoes they want to have delivered. Frew then lifts that amount the next morning and puts them straight into boxes. These are taken to the farm, where they are washed and packaged in paper bags containing 10 kg of potatoes each. They are transported in the afternoon so that they can be in the supermarkets the next morning. As the potatoes remain in the soil from a few weeks up to six months after the foliage was killed – the last plots are lifted during the winter bit by bit – and subsequently hardened off, the tubers can be polished ‘with a firm hand’ . All small packaging companies use the Veg polisher from the New Zealand company Wyma for this purpose. In the mountains, around the town of Ohakune, in the centre of North Island, there is more important table potato country Potato World 2009 • number 4 33 Pagina 32
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