PRESS RELEASE
Emmeloord, 3 April 2017
Local mayor gets potato planting underway for PotatoEurope 2017
The potatoes that will be used in the live demonstrations during the PotatoEurope trade show, which will take place on 13 and 14 September in Emmeloord, the Netherlands, have been planted. The mayor of Noordoostpolder himself, Aucke van der Werff, took to the tractor to plant the first potato. The planting machines from Grimme and Dewulf-Miedema handled the job with precision, aided by Case IH tractors.
Facts & figures
The chosen potato variety is called Innovator, 35-45 millimetres in size and with a spacing of 30 centimetres. The potatoes are being grown on a 30-hectare site belonging to the AeresLandbouwbouwbedrijf farm, where the trade show and live demos will be held on 13 and 14 September.
Event theme
The theme of PotatoEurope 2017 is ‘Potatoes Feed and Meet the World’. The event itself will form the meeting point referred to in this theme. Besides that, the potato is already an important foodstuff and is set to become even moreimportant in the future. To be able to feed the future world population the yield per hectare must be increased, primarily through precision agriculture.
Precision agriculture
The trade event is aimed at giving visitors practical tools and insights for precision agriculture in order to take the entire potato chain, both nationally and internationally, to the next level. In this context, the organisers have worked with main sponsor Case IH, Aeres University of Applied Sciences and Agrifirm, among others, to initiate a large-scale precisionagriculture project. At PotatoEurope, potatoes grown in the conventional way will be compared with potatoes grown using precision agriculture methods on an area comprising over 20 hectares, which is truly unique. In addition, there will be a live demo of controlled traffic farming with a lane width of 3.15 metres.
Mayor of World Potato City Emmeloord Aucke van der Werff himself took place in the telehandler to throw a load of seed potatoes in the Miedema planter, to get the planting underway
The precision farming project is being conducted using the Case IH system. During ploughing, the Case IH Advance Farming System (AFS) was used to determine the soil resistance. This enabled a prescription map to be produced as the basis for variable potato planting.
The crop will be monitored throughout the production season by an unmanned aerial vehicle, the Precision Hawk. The drone is fitted with high-tech cameras enabling the capture of data such as the height and quantity of the plants, the growth index and much more. The images will be processed using particular algorithms and the results will be converted into prescription maps. The potatoes that are planted variably will also be fertilised variably. At the end of the season, location-specific haulm killing will take place. The final cost-price calculations including a practical plan of attack will be presented at PotatoEurope, revealing the differences between precision agriculture and the conventional production methods.
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JannickPelle ofHamoen-Tractorenpresented the Precision project in the cultivation of the potatoes of PotatoEurope
Case IH – Grimme planting combination
Case IH – Miedemaplanting combination