James Hutton Institute

infeed equipment and replace traditional grading facilities with high-performance optical sorting technology from French machinery manufacturer MAF Agrobotic. These new upgrades combined are significantly reducing labour requirements whilst increasing capacity and yield across the company’s onion processing operations.

With annual onion processing totalling over 20,000 tons of crop, Quality Fruit & Veg Ltd works closely with its dedicated growers to ensure only the highest quality produce. “The new optical onion sorting facility from Tong is a big investment for QFV,” says Muzzafar Ali, company director at Quality Fruit & Veg Ltd. “The availability of suitable labour continues to be a big challenge in our industry, whilst demand for our produce continues to grow. We needed a more automated handling line which allows us to guarantee the quality and availability of our produce. By optically sorting crop, we are able to achieve much more consistent sorting and production.”

The new system at QFV is fed by infeed equipment which receives onions transported fresh from the field to QFV via bulker lorries. Once onions are received onto the line, onions are topped with QFV’s existing fan topper to ensure the best presentation of crop to the MAF sorter, for optimum sizing and defect sorting.

The new system sees topped onions now being transferred to MAF’s flagship optical sorting machine, the Pomone, which weight-grades crop as well as externally and internally sorting with an advanced camera system which is fine-tuned to suit the exact specification of QFV’s range of wholesale customers. The 6-lane model of the Pomone at QFV is sorting crop at an average capacity of 18 tons per hour with an average onion weight of 130 grams. The machine is capable of capacities over 18 tons per hour and larger models can be specified for processing over 30 tons per hour.

‘Fight Against Blight’ to continue for 2022 season

Work by researchers at the James Hutton Institute that helps protect Scotland’s valuable potato crop against late blight is to continue thanks to funding from the Scottish Government for the Fight Against Blight (FAB) campaign in 2022. There had been uncertainty over the ?????????????????/ future of the project following the end of AHDB Potatoes operations last year.

Professor Gerry Saddler, Head of SASA, and Chief Plant Health Officer for Scotland, said: “The Scottish Government are providing interim support for this important initiative in recognition of the needs of the Scottish potato industry.”

As in previous seasons, the work is based on monitoring of Phytophthora infestans populations by a network of agronomists, growers and industry representatives who submit field samples from suspected late blight outbreaks around the country. The 2022 effort will include the annual sampling of late blight outbreaks by these FAB Scouts and then the characterisation of pathogen populations. In work led by Dr Alison Lees, fungicide sensitivity testing will be carried out once again for a selection of active ingredients.

Feedback will be provided to scouts throughout the season and, in combination with the summary at the end of the season, updates the potato industry on best-practice for late blight management.

Project leader Dr David Cooke of the James Hutton Institute said: “This is great news for growers and the sector more widely, and it’s also great news for the longerterm research effort that supports this area. Detecting any shifts in the population as early as possible is key to understanding the threat levels, how the blight pathogen is evolving, and the responses required.”

For season 2022, previously registered FAB Scouts will automatically receive sampling packs for this continuation work. New scouts wishing to register and submit samples, or any scouts with other queries, should contact fab@hutton. ac.uk. A dedicated website will be forthcoming, and scouts will be kept informed of any developments and relevant new information. Any sample packs, prepaid envelopes and FTA cards from previous seasons can still be used.

The situation for late blight risk monitoring and response beyond 2022 is currently under discussion between a range of industry stakeholders to resource ongoing work in this area for 2023 and beyond.