CU LTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY India is on the threshold of large-scale potato mechanisation an undamaged tuber is a good start. After the harvest, the field workers put the potatoes in heaps and cover them with straw. In the Netherlands, this is called silaging. About three weeks later, these potatoes are manually graded. The lots are then put into storage until October when the new season starts. The manual grading process doesn’t always work very accurately, which is why the bigger growers are increasingly investing in grading machines. ‘To do this, Allround has developed its own machine, just like a lifter, which is currently being tested in the field’, Smit explains. ‘There’s a good market in India for small seed potatoes. The 25 to 35 mm sizes bring in twice as much as the bigger sizes’, Sangha has noticed in the market. Big cultivation risks In India, cultivating large areas of potatoes is only possible through land leasing. The government has stipulated that a family can own no more than 7 hectares of land. The average annual lease is about 1,250 euros per hectare. As there are two potato crops per season here in India, the cost for each crop is 625 euros. The total cost of producing potatoes here is around 2,500 euros per hectare. Labour takes about half the costs. With a yield of 22 tons per hectare, the cost price is 11 eurocents per kilo. So, that’s not really all that cheap, and is recognisable also in ‘For us as big seed potato growers, our brand name is our certificate’, says Sukhjit Singh Bhatti (l), who cultivates 1,000 hectares of seed annually together with his son Varunjit Singh Bhatti and daughter-in-law Anoop Bhatti. om 1.75 to 3.50 euros in recent years – professional ogistics. the Dutch situation. According to Sangha who, like Bhatti, is also active in promoting the interests of the Indian potato sector in, for example, the Confederation of Potato Seed Farmers (Poscon), the growers don’t earn a lot of money, but they do run enormous risks. ‘To reduce the migration to the cities, the government wants to guarantee them a basic income. The severe drought during the last growing season has already caused enormous problems in the cultivation of various crops, and has even led to deaths. This is why the government wants to develop a policy to improve the situation of the growers. In cases of prolonged drought, the migration towards the cities is hard to stop. In addition to tax exemption for the farmers, the government wants to double the income of the farmers in 2020. But with only 1 hectare of land, it will still be difficult to feed a family. This offers little hope for farmers. What´s more, the politicians are mainly concerned about consumer prices. The consumers determine the election results and not the farmers’, the Indian entrepreneur clarifies the difficult situation for the growers in India. ‘In addition, the potato market is very volatile. The price of seed potatoes varies between 11 and 40 rupees (15 and 54 eurocents) per kilogram. The strongly-changing demand for seed potatoes is responsible for this. If the consumption potato growers don’t earn any money, they won’t be able to spend anything in the following year and, subsequently, the price of seed will drop. The growers will then plant part of their own harvest again. Because India doesn’t have a certification system, the growers are allowed to do this, with all the negative consequences for the secAlthough India has a national government, the separate States are largely autonomous, which makes it difficult to transport potatoes from one State to another. Potato World 2017 • number 1 21 Pagina 20
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