The heat is on

We're loading Cornish new potatoes today. Yields are around 5 tonnes per acre when we would normally expect 8 tonnes per acre. There's not much else about, so we are getting pressure to crack on with the harvest. The hot dry weather seems to be increasing demand for salad and new potatoes. The great unknown is how much this dry spell will reduce yields through the effects of drought and heat stress.

The flightdeck

Stock sheet on the left hand screen, potato quality control report on
the right, linked live with the store and pack house in Boston. Is he
selling potatoes or landing a plane?

Baby potatoes

We're finding that it is quite a struggle at the moment to supply enough baby potatoes. We've got a lot of containers arriving from Israel and quite a few on stock from Egypt and Israel, but gradings of smaller fractions can't keep up with demand. Most of the minis/babies (however you want to describe them) are sold or assigned while they are still on the water.

As an alternative, we have 2009-crop French Amandine which is holding its skin finish well, but the super smalls have long since gone. The difficulty there is that supply depends on sales of the bigger fractions into the French and German markets, and demand for that sort of stuff is slow. Quite a few trucks of 42-53mm have to be graded off before one truck of 35-42mm is generated. So at the moment we're only squeezing out 1 or 2 trucks a week of the size we want for the UK.

If anyone has got any baby potatoes to offer us, we'd be glad to hear from you!