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Potato Machinery from Standen - The Early Days |
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Tea-break time. The spinner mounted on the back of the tractor uses tines to break up the potato ridge and to flick the potatoes onto the soil alongside, where the picking gang will fill hessian sacks. Today Standen is a company producing machinery for the potato grower, shipping such machines around the world. Yet not many years ago it was known for one thing above all others: its range of machines for the sugar beet grower.
As earlier chapters of this history has shown, Standen dominated the UK market for sugar beet harvesters for a couple of decades, and if in, say, 1976, someone had peered into a crystal ball and pronounced that within twenty years Standen would no longer be manufacturing any beet harvesters, but had moved to second place in the UK with their potato harvesters, they would have been ridiculed.
That nonetheless is what happened, and we will now look at how it came about.
The story is not one of continued success, and in this history we are not planning to gloss over the failures, but the outcome at the time of writing has been to create a company that has the second widest range of product for the advanced potato grower, (some say the widest, but the author does not agree), anywhere in the world.
So how did it all start?
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There are considerable similarities between the growing and harvesting of sugar beet and potatoes. Both are root crops that are planted in the spring and harvested in the autumn. They are grown in approximately similar areas, often by the same farmers.
The major difference in the crops is in the marketing. All sugar beet is sold to one customer, British Sugar, whilst potatoes are sold to a whole range of customers, including at the farm gate. Another difference is in the harvesting. Sugar beet is pulled out of the ground, given a good rubbing to clean off the soil, and dumped into a trailer. Potatoes on the other hand are eased out of the ground, gently sieved to remove the soil, and carefully lowered into specially designed trailers, or in the early days, placed in sacks.
To ensure cleanliness of the sample often the potato harvester carries a team of sorters, who pick our stones, soil clods, top, mother tubers, cut, split or green potatoes, and much else. The speed of operation is therefore much slower, and the harvesters employed in the job completely different in design, even though at first glance they would appear to be similar.
In fact for many years, until quite recently in fact, many acres were actually picked by hand, the only machine used being a digger, which lifted the potatoes out of the soil, leaving them on the ground to be hand picked.
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A Standen potato digger at a demonstration. The machines digs a single baulk, sieves out as much soil as its short length allows, and leaves the potatoes behind for the pickers to place in sacks or trays. Some of these machines are still at work in the 21st century. |
An early Standen potato harvester, the Startrite, operating in the late 1960's. Apart from the tractor driver, there are four people on the picking-table, their job being to remove as much of the unwanted material as possible, and a bag filling operator on the lower platform.
The daily output of such harvesters was around 600 bags a day, or around an acre of crop.
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Not only were Standen manufacturing potato harvesters, but they also developed the Potatovator, a machine which cultivated the soil and left it in two ridges, ready for planting. Many of these were sold, in the days before stone separation was practised. |
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Standen manufactured single-row potato harvesters throughout the 60's and 70's, in the really good years when potato prices peaked at £600 a ton, such as 1976, producing over 300 harvesters a year.
Although this today seems a massive figure, for the time it meant Standen was a fairly minor player in the market. The machines themselves were fairly basic in concept, but being inexpensive, they filled a need, and were often the first step taken by growers as they moved away from hand harvesting.
The most popular model was the Hereward, which is shown here in prototype form. This model was even "metricated" in 1978, although its life was nearly at an end. The last ones were exported to new Zealand in 1980.
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