THE four-year Potato-LITE project being delivered by a consortium of businesses, researchers and growers, is almost at the end of its first year and those involved have been organising their spring trials.
Led by PepsiCo in partnership with McCain Foods GB Ltd, GRIMME UK Ltd, Harper Adams University, Crop Health and Protection (CHAP), Cranfield University, and growers from Strawson Limited, JRO Griffiths Ltd, JM Bubb & Son and H Sutton & Son, the project received DEFRA funding in 2023. Its focus is to develop machinery and cultivation practices for the future which will enable UK potato growers to minimise tillage intensity, improve soil health and lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
The project received £4.6 million funding given from the £10m Defra pot. Nothing on this scale has ever been done before.
The Harper Adams University team began soil sampling and measuring GHG at two Shropshire sites before the first potatoes were planted last April, using a range of low intensity tillage approaches developed by the consortium.
We recently caught up with Adam Johnson, Potato Specialist at machinery manufacturer GRIMME UK, to get a better understanding of the project, its progression, and what it could mean in terms of future machinery use in cultivation.
Adam said: “We were very excited to start the Potato-LITE project as it is vital to help set the direction of potato production techniques for the future. Innovative equipment and processes are needed for us to move forwards, as UK production has reached a plateau. We hope it will help us to bring new solutions that will deliver commercial and environmental benefits through reducing the intensity of cultivations.”
Cultivation processes
Currently, potato cultivation is a heavy process, with significant volumes of soil being moved to bury stones and clods to establish a friable seed bed. The project is looking at the processes within potato production – deep ridging, de-stoning and bed tilling – to study the effects of each and determine whether it will move a problem further down the road.
“If you drive past a potato field, you can always see where the stone rows have been. What we’re asking is how quickly that soil will recover back to full health, full drainage, how we get to that in the shortest possible time and which one of these different levels of intensity cultivation methods is best suited for that, while not impacting the yield or store ability,” said Adam.
Potato Lite is running repeated, highly scientific trials focussing on these issues, as well as the carbon dioxide impact.
“If you look at the goals set by government, companies like McCain and Pepsico have released their global strategies and want all their growers to be doing this. They haven’t prescribed how they have to achieve this but they have said ‘here’s the target you need to get to’.
“We’re basically looking at how we can take these wishes, and government wishes, and apply it in ways that come with positive recommendations for growers,” said Adam.
While the project’s ultimate goal is to understand the differences between different treatments, taking into account the economic and environmental aspects, it is essential to ensure future practices are viable for growers, he stressed.
“You need a huge amount of data sent to be able to do this. We said, as a consortium, that the project was going to go ahead one way or another – the government money just made it slightly easier. Having the universities on board, validating things, is a real plus,” said Adam.
Stone island
Around 70% of the potato growing area in the UK has stone in it in one form or another, which presents British growers with a challenge that is less of a concern for European growers.
“Europe does not have the stone challenges we have. We have this lovely beautiful island we call home, but with this huge stone content,” said Adam.
“The Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire areas were originally the potato growing areas. Now it’s everywhere. In the 1960s there were hardly any potato growers in Yorkshire, now there are 16,000-17,000 hectares of potato there.”
The rise in designated potato-growing land came about following the introduction of destoning machinery in the 1970s and opened up many opportunities for growers.
“Rotation used to be one in three. We can now deal with stone and go for longer rotations but to achieve that we have to move further afield,” said Adam.
“The industry has driven potatoes to be planted in areas where potatoes probably wouldn’t normally be planted. Over the years, growers have come to us and asked us to develop solutions to be able to do these processes in ground that probably is not good for potatoes. Now we’re looking at how we can reduce that impact on soil structure, carbon emission and so on.”
No ‘one cap fits all’
Adam said that within potato growing, there is a ‘one cap fits all’ perception which he said is the wrong approach, especially when it comes to cultivation.
Even with high stone content, a different approach will still be needed in different parts of the country, owing to the types of stone found there and the damage they can inflict. There is a need to look at things on a field-by-field basis, he stressed.
Machinery development and adaptations will be made based on project findings.
Grange machinery, a contractor based in Holderness, East Yorkshire which provides low disturbance subsoilers and parts, is working alongside Grimme within the project, looking at how existing machines can be adapted to achieve the same results but with lower disturbance.
To read the full feature, don't miss the March issue of British Potato Review. You can subscribe here for a digital or printed copy.
