Fair Fields farm crisps

[Exfarmer]

following a tweet by @RTK Farmer ( I believe ) about Fair fields farm crisps being min till , I thought, how do you grow potatoes in this situation?
My own experience of growing them has always been about as far from min till as any system can ever be.
I may have the wrong end of the stick perhaps?
However going to the Fair Fields website, certainly gives no clues as it has been hacked, I guess, it has an artistic view, little to do with potatoes

 

[Bury the Trash]

following a tweet by @RTK Farmer ( I believe ) about Fair fields farm crisps being min till , I thought, how do you grow potatoes in this situation?
My own experience of growing them has always been about as far from min till as any system can ever be.
I may have the wrong end of the stick perhaps?
However going to the Fair Fields website, certainly gives no clues as it has been hacked, I guess, it has an artistic view, little to do with potatoes

Do you mean No till?

 

[Exfarmer]

Do you mean No till?

Probably, yes

 

[Chae1]

following a tweet by @RTK Farmer ( I believe ) about Fair fields farm crisps being min till , I thought, how do you grow potatoes in this situation?
My own experience of growing them has always been about as far from min till as any system can ever be.
I may have the wrong end of the stick perhaps?
However going to the Fair Fields website, certainly gives no clues as it has been hacked, I guess, it has an artistic view, little to do with potatoes

They grow them ontop of cover crop, under straw. Was a good explanation on procam tent at groundswell. Free no till crisps in bag, were really good.

 

[Suffolk Serf]

There's a story about it in the latest "Direct Driller" magazine. An electronic version will be somewhere on this forum (Issue 6, page 90).
No dig vegetable gardens, including potatoes work very well.

 

[Bury the Trash]

I bet they get a a big percent of pigs teddies


Do they irrigate ?

Slug paradise.

 

[Exfarmer]

They grow them ontop of cover crop, under straw. Was a good explanation on procam tent at groundswell. Free no till crisps in bag, were really good.

Thanks , very interesting, I wonder what they do with the straw afterwards as there must be a lot of it?
I suspect slugs would be an issue

 

[Bury the Trash]

'No dig for Victory ' doesnt quite have the same ring to it....


Btw,
Anyone heard the saying ... ' potatoes only fit for pigs and shearers '

 

[renewablejohn]

It works really well have been no dig here for over ten years now. I dont have straw but use dried rushes instead. Slugs have little chance against the propane burner. My rushes breakdown into compost for following year brassica crops.

 

[Chae1]

Thanks , very interesting, I wonder what they do with the straw afterwards as there must be a lot of it?
I suspect slugs would be an issue

Same as they do after carrots i suspect. Just incorporate it.

 

[RushesToo]

https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/no-till-potatoes.58166/
@martian using child slave labour

 

[Exfarmer]

Same as they do after carrots i suspect. Just incorporate it.

I had assumed that this was looking at systems using no deep cultivation. Harvesting in Autumn/ winter with large machinery can leave some interesting challenges, incorporating straw after carrots, 2x 250 hp tractors Pulling 4 furrows to meet a deadline comes to mind.
I do understand that this of course, is the first step in trialling the viability of growing potatoes in this way.
For processing I can see it could be fairly simple to develop, as skin finish and some slug damage is not so critical. I would guess trickle irrigation would prevent straw being washed away, if that was an issue.
Did they use no blight spray? If not they were lucky as 2018 was a very kind year.
It will be a challenge for the harvesters , but not having to process thousands of tonnes of slub in a wet year has a lot of attractions

 

[Bury the Trash]

Grow them on level ground that has low risk of washing , use small kit like a little fergy with a 2 row planter let the imported labour drive them if no one local wants too ...
Why does everything have to be to extremes ? Is it because people get bored and want the next new thing

 

[Chae1]

My understanding was it was a small area speaking to chap on procam stand.

Yields were well back second year.

 

[Suffolk Serf]

Grow them on level ground that has low risk of washing , use small kit like a little fergy with a 2 row planter let the imported labour drive them if no one local wants too ...
Why does everything have to be to extremes ? Is it because people get bored and want the next new thing

No, no, no, don't you realise that your manliness as a potato grower is measured by the number of tractors and destoners that you can get together in one field complete with other tractors on triple bed tillers and deep cultivation trains?

 

[7610 super q]

OK. So how do you plant them, and how do you harvest them ?

 

[Daniel]

Wasn't this a couple of hundred square metres of potatoes to see if it would work, which were hand harvested and then obviously Fairfields have made them into crisps?

I doubt incorporating all that straw with a spader or similar machine is entirely in line with no till principles, but it's an interesting experiment.

 

[Exfarmer]

OK. So how do you plant them, and how do you harvest them ?

I suspect they were hand planted, but you could certainly run a modified planter across the top. Would need discs to cut through the trash, then a straw layer to follow. I think if I was doing it, I would do it rather like putting rape in, behind a shallow sub soil tine. They are very deep rooters. Harvesting would be my concern

 

[martian]

We grew these spuds on the Groundswell site last year. No irrigation, no sprays, no fertiliser, not many potatoes. We spread some FYM on ground, sprinkled seed spuds over about 1/4 acre and covered with a deep layer of straw. Wet the straw to stop it blowing away and that was that.

At harvest time we pulled the straw to one side and gathered the spuds off the surface. As I said, yield was a bit disappointing, costs were diddly squat (as @RushesToo said, we used slave labour). It was really about showing what was possible and challenging the standard soil mangling potato growing systems.

There was a lot of straw left over. George Sly came by a few weeks ago with his strip-tilling machine, which pulled the straw to one side, revealing lovely moist soil into which he planted sweet corn and vegetables. The straw should act as a weed suppressing mulch and there won't be much left by harvest time anyway. The last time we grew spuds this way we left it as a fallow the following year and the area where the straw was ended up beautifully black and blackgrass free. Make of that what you will. Unfortunately we moved the Groundswell site this year so I don't think any delegates bothered crossing the road to have a look at the vegetables.

 

[Exfarmer]

We grew these spuds on the Groundswell site last year. No irrigation, no sprays, no fertiliser, not many potatoes. We spread some FYM on ground, sprinkled seed spuds over about 1/4 acre and covered with a deep layer of straw. Wet the straw to stop it blowing away and that was that.

At harvest time we pulled the straw to one side and gathered the spuds off the surface. As I said, yield was a bit disappointing, costs were diddly squat (as @RushesToo said, we used slave labour). It was really about showing what was possible and challenging the standard soil mangling potato growing systems.

There was a lot of straw left over. George Sly came by a few weeks ago with his strip-tilling machine, which pulled the straw to one side, revealing lovely moist soil into which he planted sweet corn and vegetables. The straw should act as a weed suppressing mulch and there won't be much left by harvest time anyway. The last time we grew spuds this way we left it as a fallow the following year and the area where the straw was ended up beautifully black and blackgrass free. Make of that what you will. Unfortunately we moved the Groundswell site this year so I don't think any delegates bothered crossing the road to have a look at the vegetables.

Thanks for posting!

Was there any slug damage?