Harvest 2024 has begun!
The first potato harvesting of 2024 is well underway, with Maris Peer and Lady Christl being lifted from fields above the scenic cliffs of South West Cornwall. Read on to see the journey of a new potato from the field to your fork.
Harvesting
As these first potatoes are the ‘newest’ of the new potato crop, we have to be both quick and careful to get them out of the ground in good condition – they’ve got a long journey ahead!
Once the potatoes have grown to the right size, we start by topping the leaves; this helps reduce the amount of waste material further on in the process.
Harvesting then begins in earnest: a tractor pulls the harvester along the rows of topped potatoes, lifting them out of the soil and onto a conveyor web. This carries the load up towards a picking team on the back of the harvester, who remove plant matter and stones as they pass by.
The checked potatoes are then taken up a slotted elevator and dropped into the waiting trailer, with a basket and straps helping to ease them in.
This process continues until the trailer is full, then it’s time to head back to the farm…
Grading
Once the tractor and trailer arrive safely on the farm, there’s no time to lose! The potatoes are tipped straight onto the grader, where more quality control takes place.
Moving up the belt, the potatoes travel across a series of rollers which remove some of the soil from the field. They’re then transported further along the grader, where our farm team check them over as they pass by to ensure the highest quality product leaves the farm. Small stones and any other stray bits from the field are removed from the line, with the stones and soil later returned to the original field.
At the end of the grading line, the potatoes are carefully placed into waiting boxes, which are labelled with the variety, harvest date and field they came from.
Leaving the farm, extra checks and packing
By this time, the collecting lorry has arrived. The boxed potatoes are put straight on, with the lorry departing as soon as everything is secure.
The lorry heads off and keeps going through the night, to get our potatoes to the customer’s packing facility early the following morning.
The pace doesn’t let up here – less than a day after being harvested, the new potatoes go through another round of quality control!
Our potatoes are further checked over by the customer’s dedicated processing team, who sort them into specific qualities, sizes and bags.
The following day, these freshly dug spuds end up on the shelves of supermarkets across the country, ready to eat. It takes a lot of coordination to pull it off, but we couldn’t be prouder of supplying the freshest potatoes to customers, 48 hours after harvest!
We hope you’ve enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at harvesting new potatoes. If you’d like to see the full cycle of planting, harvesting and storage, check out our Potatoes Page.
