Tong Engineering has designed a custom-built seed potato grading facility for B&C Farming – a Norfolk-based contract farmer and potato grower – taking into account the latter’s current and future requirements. B&C Farming has been using a custom grading line from Pearl Engineering for 29 years and needed to upgrade to newer, more efficient equipment.

Since reduction of labor costs was a key objective in the specification of the new line, Tong implemented a side-eject box tipper that feeds the crop into the line.

“It is a fine line between keeping the forklift drivers busy, and them being too rushed, risking accidents or causing the line to stop and wait for the crops. The side-eject box tipper not only reduces forklift movement, allowing us to cut the number of forklifts required for grading, but it also ensures a continuous flow of crop onto the grading line,” said Tony Bambridge, managing director at B&C Farming.

Labor requirements at the crop cleaning and grading section of the line have also been taken into consideration.

“Taking care of the complete grading system from start to finish, Tong integrated the Tomra FPS (field potato sorter) into the line for automatic detection of stones and clod in the unwashed crop. With this removal of debris now being performed automatically, inspection staff can now focus on grading for quality of the potatoes, with size-grading took care of by Tong’s EasyGrade screen grading modules. What’s more, inspection staff are now in a fully-insulated, heated and sound-proofed cabin, allowing for much more pleasant inspection conditions,” Bambridge continues.

The new grading line at B&C Farming also features Tong’s box filler, the Midi EasyFill which transfers graded and sorted crop back into boxes for storage. In addition, a series of Tong vertical lowerator box fillers are used for high capacity yet gentle box filling. According to Bambridge when the crop comes out of store and is ready for delivery to customers Tong’s UniFill big bag filler comes into its own as the crop is tipped onto a second line where it passes through final inspection and is filled into 1- or 1,25-ton bags.

Tong Engineering’s Managing Director Edward Tong also commented on the new implementation: “It has been a real pleasure working closely with the team at B&C Farming to design and manufacture a grading line that fits their brief in terms of grading requirements, but also considers the layout requirements for efficient operation in their recently built shed. Our project management team worked with Tony and his team throughout the install to get everything running smoothly in time for their grading season at the beginning of 2019. We have almost doubled the throughput of our grading facility whilst cutting out a forklift operator, and we have been maintaining if not improving quality.”

B&C Farming, based in Marsham, Norfolk, work with Greenvale AP and McCain to supply seed potatoes direct to growers. Operating a “just in time” delivery system using the companies own trucks, B&C Farming supply seed at planting. A new grading facility will ensure they can continue to produce more, higher-quality seed potatoes in line with ongoing contract demands.