UK: Potato industry cannot continue to stand this season’s storage losses, event hears

The warm, wet winter weather has meant challenging conditions for potato storage, delegates to the annual AHDB Potatoes’ Storage Forum at Sutton Bridge Crop Storage Research (SBCSR) in Lincolnshire heard earlier this month. Norfolk-based potato consultant Simon Alexander said: “The industry cannot continue to stand the storage losses it’s seen this season. We need early adopters of best practice on board.” He explained: “The ideal is to have the crops dried within three weeks, but we were seeing four- and even five-week drying periods at the outset. And the subsequent lack of cool, and most importantly dry, air over the winter months limited our opportunities as store managers to dry out the crops without then hitting dew point.” Helping store operators to get a strong grip of their storage costs, Nick Blake of Andersons Eastern presented the new AHDB Storage Cost Calculator, available to download free in Excel format from potatoes.ahdb.org.uk/storage-calculator. More