CU LTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY Transparent taring is essential for a fair price retail, food retail and food retail outlets and foodservice companies at home and abroad. Offering a lot of information In the taring area you can see how the certified inspector, behind a well-lit inspection table, quickly and skilfully cuts a number of suspicious tubers. With considerable experience, he throws the washed and peeled tubers into the appropriate trays. ‘We want to tell our growers exactly what was wrong in a particular lot’, Van Boxtel explains. ‘Only mentioning “defects” gives too little information. This especially applies to potatoes we grow on the south-eastern sandy soils in the Netherlands and just over the borders with Belgium and Germany. A great deal can go wrong with these potatoes, during growth as well as during transport. Mechanical damage and blue is the result of human error. Excessive green due to run-off or ridges tearing open due to drought was unavoidable this year. And it’s also important that the grower is aware of the type of defects in his potatoes or plots. This is farm management information that the farmer can apply for future plot choices and cultivation measures. Immediately available results ‘We aim to achieve a maximum kilogram yield per hectare in the correct grades, with a minimum underwater weight of 360 grams and over a hundred tubers per metre. That’s the ideal Hansa potatoes lot for us, and so also the ideal lot for the grower’, Van Boxtel briefly explains at the inspection table. ‘Our reason for investing in a new and automatic RMA taring system is that we want to get reliable results from our potatoes, because it largely determines the price for the grower and it’s also important to optimise the software of the machinery in the factory’, Van Boxtel emphasises. Meanwhile, by pushing a button, the inspector sends the taring information to the Navision computer program, where the system stores all the data and sends it directly to the administrative department and the growers. Prior to the visual check, the entire lot has already been automatically inspected by the RMA inspection line, so that all the results are immediately available and the grower and his adviOn a touch screen, the inspector selects the type of sample. After pushing the start button, the line starts up. The first step is to wash the sample to remove the sand. On the inspection table, the inspector removes impurities that are subsequently weighed and automatically appear in the taring report. A sensor counts the number of tubers of each size and a weighing machine determines the total weight. The samples are placed in an automatic salt bath where the floaters are separated from the other potatoes. The specific gravity of the water is constantly measured. The floaters are kept behind in the salt bath and are weighed. The healthy tubers continue in the process. 26 Potato World 2017 • number 1 Pagina 25
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