FoodTrust - Connections

This will be the first in a series about the Visser farm, and their newest machinery acquisition.

The Visser’s recently acquired a new potato grading/sizing machine from Grimme Technica, leaders in potato handling systems. We are using our SmartSpud to help them tuned it up. About a week ago William told me it was going to be running that day. Since I was going to be in the area anyway I thought I’d pop over and check it out.

The whole system is quite an impressive sight. It fills most of the space in their parking lot when it is assembled to operate. At the left of the picture is the RH Combi unit. This post will focus on that unit and its purpose.

The Combi unit accepts the potatoes as they are dumped from the truck. It has a huge capacity (wish I knew how many pounds per hour it can process, but I don’t at the moment). The dirt and rocks are separated, each taking a separate path out of the machine to be dumped into trucks. The potatoes then pass the human component of the process. Six people were watching the line, picking out stray debris and bad potatoes as they whizzed by.

After the human inspectors the potatoes pass over a rubber mesh that performs the first in a series of size separations. Potatoes too large to fit through the mesh go one way, everything else went in the other direction.

What does this mean for you? Well, to begin with the machine is built to reduce mechanical damage, like bruising, to the potatoes. We are further reducing damage by tuning the machine using the SmartSpud to identify problem areas. We are continually raising the bar on quality and this is one way we are able to do that.

The next steps in the process will be topics for future post.

I happened to have a video camera with me. Windows Movie Maker is a wonderful little program.

Scott