Farm Of The Week: Potatoes still prove to be a hot topic

POTATOES are still big business and not easily replaced by imports. Until somebody gets instant mash right, it still costs quite a lot to move enough potatoes to feed the British and local supply is becoming more important, not less.

As the buzz at Manor Farm demonstrates, there are still opportunities in spuds – and Yorkshire is finding them.

Wholecrop Marketing Limited started off employing two men and a secretary in one room in 2008 and now has eight staff occupying a rented farmstead at Kirkburn, near Driffield.

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A comeback of the co-op idea, it was founded by eight farmers and two professional potato traders with a purpose embodied in its name – to get the best possible price for every grade.

“Anybody can sell a perfect spud,” says Mark Tomlinson. He runs a small mixed farm near Selby but made his living out of dealing potatoes until he and a colleague, David Burks, got together with the growers. The two of them are in the co-op but are also in the team of employees who make Manor Farm a one-stop shop. Here, crops are tested for dry matter content – the crucial measurement, which decides their destination – and graded for looks; crisping varieties are cooked to make sure they will turn out the right colour; potatoes are matched with buyers; and storage and transport are arranged.

Tomlinson and Burks knew some merchants were making money from ‘write-offs’. A lot of potatoes will not do for the supermarkets because they have bad skins or damage, but are still worth something to a business which is going to peel them – restaurant, manufacturer of chips or soup, or livestock farmer wanting fodder. Whole potatoes for the home cook are only half the market nowadays. And even that market is always changing. Mark’s daughter runs a shop selling produce from his own 130 acres – Spuds & Berries, on the A63 at Hemingbrough – and a lot of its customers like their potatoes and leeks unwashed, contrary to all the marketing wisdom of recent years, because they just like the smell.

Wholecrop Marketing was set up to look down all possible avenues and to be totally transparent about what it got, what haulage costs were involved and what cut it took – a fixed percentage.

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Clearly, all merchants are going to say they do their best. But Wholecrop’s promises to its members struck a chord which brought in a couple of dozen other growers, just as customers. Tonnage handled has doubled to 120,000, from Lancashire, Cheshire and the Scottish Borders, as well as all over Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and turnover from £6m to approaching £20m. Wholecrop has a range of big chippers and crispers within a 60-mile radius – and has also found an unexpectedly successful niche trialling and supplying seed potatoes for the trade.

It was best small business in Bridlington and the Wolds in the Hull Chamber of Commerce awards last year. And it is sponsoring the SAC Potato Conference at York on February 8 – one of the big events of the growers’ calendar. Theme this year will be conservation of resources. It is a theme in every sector of agriculture nowadays, of course, but the potato business is having to think about it harder than most.

As Mark Tomlinson says: “Potatoes are a hungry crop.” They need a lot of nutrients, a lot of water, a lot of cultivation, a lot of chemicals and then they have to be stored at 2C to 4C until needed, which means using electricity October to July. They are also a high-profile food – especially in their processed forms. PepsiCo, parent company of Walkers Crisps, has promised to cut the water and carbon consumption of its farming by 50 per cent over five years and if the eco-friendliness of your crisps, chips or mash, is not yet much of an area of competition, rest assured preparations are being made for when it might be.

The farming industry has had to promise to reduce its environmental footprint and everyone is braced for the day targets become as binding as they are in steel-making.

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Apart from all that, resources are becoming a real agricultural issue. Artificial fertiliser costs fuel. Getting enough water for potatoes, all year round, starts to be an issue on sand and chalk south of the Humber and is becoming a worry down in East Anglia. One big source of potatoes has always been Scotland, east of a line from Perth to Inverness. In particular, the Scots run a lot of the nurseries where seeds became seedlings – mainly under glass – and have traditionally used their local farmers for turning them into the tubers needed by growers of ‘ware potatoes’ – for eating.

You can keep saving potatoes to start another crop but after a year or two, you lose youthful vigour and need to go back to the seedsmen. The Scots have had history on their side in this market, plus plenty of water and a cool climate, meaning fewer pests.

But Wholecrop discovered this was a situation ripe for change. Scottish weather also means a late harvest. Yorkshire can beat it by 10 days to a month and Wholecrop has picked up customers in Spain, Egypt, Algeria, Cornwall and Suffolk, who want to plant earlies. It has also found that Norfolk farmers like to see the seed fields they are buying from, and Driffield is handier than Dundee.

Wholecrop’s newest director and employee, Chris Yardley, was brought in a year ago particularly to handle the booming seed potatoes business. He sums up: “Scotland is a bit too wet; East Anglia is a bit too dry; Yorkshire is just about right. We can manage the pests. And the big one for potatoes, eel worm, is best controlled by planting in land that has not had potatoes in it for seven or eight years. We can easily get a rotation of 10-15 years. That saves £150 a hectare on nematocides and £40-£50 on seed treatments before you plant.”

See www.wholecropmarketing.co.uk or call 01377 217873. For more on the SAC Potato Growers’ Conference, call Caroline Rowe on 01668 283363 or email [email protected]

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