Potato farmers could be wasting time and resources ploughing and de-stoning their land, a Scottish consultant told growers visiting the industry’s new AHDB monitor farm project near Meigle.
Dr Stuart Wale, head of crop services at SAC, said many farmers were currently working their land “recreationally” by following standard practices, and he suggested that practical trials on the host monitor farm could save the industry money in the long term.
“People do things routinely, recreationally, because its what they’ve done in the past. The brilliant opportunity here is that they can see what changes they can make, whether they’re realistic or not, because there’s always a judgement call in farming,” he said.
“These growers can see in practice what the opportunities are and how they can save money.”
Dr Wale pointed to ploughing and deep de-stoning of potato fields as examples of practices that could be trialled on the Bruce Farms potato enterprise at Meigle. And he quoted some recent Scottish trial results which showed that shallow de-stoning actually resulted in slightly higher yields.
He added: “I don’t know anyone here who doesn’t plough for potatoes, but having seen it around the world, ploughing isn’t primary cultivation, I wonder why we’re so hooked on it.
“And you know better than I that we have extremely variable fields in Scotland. You can have four or five different soil types in the same field and yet we generally apply the same uniform cultivations, fertilisers and agrochemicals across the whole field, so variability is something you need to address.
“Can we change what we do to get the best out of fields which have variability.”
However Dr Wale insisted that the trials ultimately chosen by the industry should be appropriate to Scotland.
“We need to address the fact we have very different seasons and extreme events. In this part of the world you’ve had some pretty bad flooding. We have years when we have high rainfall, we’ve had cooler springs recently and we’re having late planting and late harvest.
“Whatever we do and trial we need to remember it has to be resilient so every year is going to be the best for us.”
