Action at the Packhouse

Potatoes arrive thick and fast…

In the December period our packhouse is at full steam! Potatoes arrive from across all areas of the farm. Potatoes don’t like to sit around so we make sure to clean, sort and pack them as fast as we can. Below you can get a good idea as to how they arrive covered in soil in large bags straight from the fields, up to the final step where they are packed and ready to be loaded onto the truck.

The first step is always hosing down the potatoes as they arrive from the fields. This helps remove some of the excess soil, but also loosens them up so to flow easier out the bottom of the bag:

Before we start sorting the potatoes we have to give them a good clean. We send them through a sprinkler system and then a large spinning water hamster wheel. After moving through a drying tunnel they travel across a specially designed set of rollers with various sized spacing. Here the smaller potatoes fall through the gaps below and become separated from the larger ones. In the image bottom right you can see how various sizes of potatoes are travelling along the channels.

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By the time they reach the workers they are size sorted and cleaned. Quality control is a hands on process however, and our staff make sure only the best potatoes go through to bagging.

The final step before being loaded onto the truck to be delivered nation wide is that of bagging. We have machines that automatically fill our bags, but then workers also check each bag on a scale that the weight is correct before it is stitched closed.