Doing it the old fashioned way...

Sometimes regression to apparently outmoded practices can seem little more than a marketing tactic. Most people are familiar with the benefits, particularly environmental, of organic farming and the positive effects on ecosystems of not using pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertiliser. However, glance at the picture of a little old man digging potatoes with a spade on the back of a packet of Tyrell's and you immediately know that, not only is that clearly not how Tyrell's harvest their spuds, but there could really be no concrete benefit of doing such a thing besides an enormously inflated end product price point.

Call me a cynic, but my eyes are opening to exceptions. The first job I remember getting properly involved with and paid for as a child was potato grading. Back then, potatoes were lifted mechanically and would arrive by the trailerload into the grading shed, where an apparently neverending cascade would come tumbling along a conveyor belt while as many as six people pored over the many thousand passing tubers, snatching away anything that was damaged, the wrong size, or going green.


Since going organic, our potato growing operations are being scaled back each year, largely on account of the unreliable price that organic potatoes are achieving from wholesalers and distributers and their susceptability to adverse-weather-induced harvesting disasters. It is nevertheless astonishing to compare our current harvesting method with what has gone before. Potatoes are still lifted mechanically but they are now left in their rows in the field. The potatoes are then graded by hand directly in to bags and any waste is left in the rows and worked back into the ground - it is, as Tim Rice would say, the Circle of Life.

Bertie is our new puppy. He tries to make himself useful.