TRADE AND MARKETING Nematodes change UK market in pursuit of new, nematode-resistant varieties – and they have been quite successful here and there. Some of the varieties that are to replace the old ones come from the Dutch breeding station KWS Potato B.V. in the village of Nagele. They include the well-known Ramos and new varieties such as Eurostar and VR808. ‘In order to successfully introduce such varieties in Great Britain, which is rather conservative as far as potatoes are concerned, you need to gather a great deal of local data yourself in order to convince buyers of their added market value’, KWS area manager Jaap Brondijk explains. Together with his English colleague Peter Hewett, we visited a packager, a trader and growers who are adapting their cultivation scheme as best they can to both the current specific demand of the British consumer and the nematode problem. M Buying with your eyes Caroline Williams of Produce World is an agronomist and supports British and Spanish growers who supply potatoes. The British company has a packing station and a storehouse in Sutton Bridge. Williams tells us that she’s looking for varieties for cultivation and marketing with broad nematode resistance, a low nitrogen requirement and a high percentage of bakers. The latter are potatoes with a diameter bigger than 65 millimetres. The company grows 100 hectares of table potatoes themselves and work together with 35 English growers, who all have a cultivation contract. The 60,000 tons of potatoes packaged by Produce World annually are largely (86 percent) destined for the British Waitrose supermarket chain. Produce World is currently working on the introduction of Eurostar. ‘The Eurostar did well in taste tests carried out by the buyer’, Williams tells us. ‘Despite the fact that the taste of the potatoes is important, consumers are mostly buying with their eyes. Lots with scab infections, for example, are hard to sell in the table potato segment. That’s what growers should remember. Eurostar is an excellent, multi-purpose variety: if eanwhile, growers and buyers are Peter Hewett, Jaap Brondijk and Caroline Williams |l to r) are in search of nematode-resistant varieties for the British market. not up to standard as a table potato, it can easily be used for the processing industry. A disadvantage, however, is that the cost price of a crop grown as table potatoes is higher because of the necessary usage of irrigation and products to improve the quality of the skin. To avoid scab, almost all growers in the UK irrigate their table potatoes, resulting in a cost price of at least EUR 6,750 per hectare’, Williams explains. Nematodes in the field Williams closely monitors the development of the crops of the various growers during the growing season. That is important because British consumers want their table potatoes to be of high quality. They want attractive, firmskinned potatoes. They should be especially attractive during the weekend when most British people have Jacket potatoes on the menu. For this dish, potatoes are roasted in the oven in their skins, for which reason the skin should be perfect. The consumer is not interested in the range of resistances a variety has, which are very important to the grower, however. Many growers are facing nematode problems in their fields. Grower Bill Legge has 400 hectares of peaty soil in Norfolk near the village of Ten Miles Bank. He plants 50 hectares of potatoes for processing into crisps and chips annually, with 25 hectares of table potatoes and 25 hectares for the fish & chips market. He delivers them himself in 25 kg paper bags. He admits that the potato cyst nematode problem has been grossly underestimated in the past. ‘Twenty years ago, we thought that we’d have a scientific solution for the nemaGREAT BRITAIN In 2013, 2,129 professional growers in Great Britain produced 87 percent of the acreage. The total surface was 122,200 hectares this year. The British are real potato eaters, according to the figures from the British Potato Council. In 2011, they consumed 91.6 kilograms of which 39.7 kilograms were fresh and 51.9 kilograms were processed potatoes. The current trend is that the fresh consumption is decreasing slightly every year. In total, 1.9 million tons were processed in 2011, over 1 million tons of which were processed as deep-frozen chips and 736,000 tons as crisps. Furthermore, the UK imported another 1.4 million tons of processed produce in 2012 on the basis of fresh potatoes. The total annual potato consumption is approximately 5.5 million tons. Potato World 2013 • number 4 21 Pagina 20
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