Growing potatoes to be sold locally has become a passion for one Prembrokeshire producer. Debbie James reports.
Every so often, Walter Simon's phone will ping with a text message from a friend, praising the taste and quality of potatoes they have sourced from a Welsh supermarket in packaging bearing his name.
Understandably, he gets a terrific buzz from that affirmation and says: "It is very nice when friends take a photo of the bag and complement me on my potatoes.
"For years we exported potatoes to Liverpool, Manchester and further afield and never saw them for sale but now I can go into a local supermarket and see my potatoes. There is a huge amount of pride in selling locally grown potatoes to the local population.''
For more than 20 years Mr Simon's business has been supplying potatoes to Pembrokeshire-based Puffin Produce who market them under the Blas y Tir brand to supply to supermarkets in Wales.
He says: "Welsh potatoes for Welsh customers is far better all round that importing potatoes from mainland Europe."
He has specialised in producing potatoes since 1999 but grows only a small percentage on his 140-hectare farm at West Orielton, Hundleton, where he lives with his wife, Penny.
That land is rented out to a beef farmer because the soil conditions are much better suited to livestock farming than potato production.
"I grow potatoes on about 35 per cent of my farm every five or six years but do not grow on the rest of it because it is too stony or wet, not really suitable for potatoes,'' Mr Simon explains.
He is atypical of most traditional farmers because he grows just one crop and most of that is grown on other people's land.
Over the past two decades he has developed business relationships with half a dozen local farmers to rent fields on a one-in-six rotation.
Ideally, the land will be stone-free and fairly deep and is a mixture of soil types ranging from sandy soil and red sandstone to limestone.
"We try to avoid too much clay because it can sit a bit wet and make planting and harvesting difficult,'' says Mr Simon.
"In the west we have quite a narrow planting window because of our rainfall levels and the other soil types give us a wider window of workability. The clay can be like plastic when it is wet and when it gets dry it is like cobbles that we have to smash up.''
The ideal land type for potatoes is largely dependent on the weather conditions in the growing year; that is where having a range of fields is an advantage.
"Something that holds water will be better in a dry year and red sandstone in a wetter year,'' says Mr Simon. "I do not know what weather we are going to get from year to year so having a range of soils spread the risk and it means that in an average year we can produce potatoes from most of it, if not all.''
He is a strong advocate of maximising soil health. To build soil fertility and resilience, he grew cover crops on the entire acreage he has under potatoes this year.
"This year, for the first time, every field was green over winter with cover crops or grass, all 160 acres,'' he says.
"We often hear that some fields have only got 100 harvests left in them, I want to make sure that when I finish growing my crop of potatoes that they still have 100 left in them, if not more.''
Protecting soil health is also part and parcel of being a good tenant, he adds. "I want to show my landlords that I am farming that land as well as they would because would like to be renting that land again in five or six years' time.''
Oats and vetch are planted in August or September after the preceding arable crop - oats for biomass and vetch to fix nitrogen, and then grazed by sheep.
Cover crops deliver a multitude of benefits, from sequestering carbon and adding organic matter, to preventing winter run off. If there is no cover crop there will be six months when the soil is not fed, Mr Simon says.
"Soil is a living eco system and a growing plant exports complex carbohydrates out of its roots to the bacteria, the fungi, the microorganism, to feed them so that they can deliver it back with nutrients and minerals.
"I have also learned that growing a cover crop as soon as the preceding cereal crop comes off keeps it in better condition for the spring. It feeds the bugs and the earthworms over the winter rather than it being a desert for five months over the winter.''
Grazing the crops with sheep adds further organic matter to the soil. Fields are ploughed in February or March and this year planting got underway on March 25 with 32ha of the salad varieties, Paris, Gemson and Gerona, and 32ha of maincrop Maris Piper, Orla and Sunita.
Fitting the ridging tractor with GPS and autosteer has improved efficiency.
"We no longer get the variability that comes with establishing drills with the human eye, we used to err on the side of having slightly wider drills, but we now have much more repeatable and even crops and we will get a couple more drills in the fields because of that accuracy,'' says Mr Simon.
Another policy that maintains efficiency is to not plant in patches of fields where the soil is poor.
"If there is half an acre of stony ground or a corner of clay we do not plant there. It is much better to put all the investment into good soil because it makes management, planting and harvesting easier and we will have 99 per cent good quality potatoes rather than seeing our efficiency disappearing with 5 per cent that are below standard.''
Potatoes were planted in what was the coldest April for 60 years - Wales recorded 21 frosts in that month, but planting finished by April 28, no later than usual.
Cold temperatures persisting into May was the biggest issue and could result in a two-week delay to harvesting.
In an average year, lifting of the salad varieties will start at the beginning of August with an expected yield of 25-37 tonnes (t)/ha (10-15 tonne/acre). Maris Piper, harvested in September, yields 49-62t/ha (20-25t/acre), and the other maincrops up to 62t/ha (25t/acre).
"Every year we generally grow a couple of new varieties for the Blas y Tir range, to try to keep on top of growing quality varieties, to see if they will work in Pembrokeshire,'' says Mr Simon.
Potatoes are harvested with a trailed harvester into one-tonne boxes and these go straight into cold storage at Puffin Produce's depot in Haverfordwest.
"Cold storage means we can produce as good a quality potato in west Wales as they can in the east of England and we have some added advantages because we have a higher rainfall and need less irrigation,'' says Mr Simon.
The aim is to finish harvesting by the end of September to allow the landlords a good window of opportunity to get their next crops planted.
One of the biggest challenges of growing potatoes is that they grow underground so the crop can be difficult to monitor for pests and diseases.
There can be some surprises when harvesting starts. Mostly good when they are better than expected, but if there are pests and diseases it can sometimes be too late to react.
Mr Simon mitigates the chances of that occurring through field choices and doing a very good job. Wireworm and slugs can be an issue so ferric phosphate pellets which are animal and insect friendly are laid around the field headlands to prevent slug incursions from the field edges.
Mr Simon says: "We have used these pellets since they first came out because I did not like using the metaldehyde pellets. You can certainly see that there are more beetles in the field eating the slugs."
Blemish diseases are managed by having a wide rotation. Having a four or five year rotation between crops builds soil carbon and creates good conditions for growing potatoes.
When Mr Simon first came home to farm, the family had dairy and beef cattle and after 10 years of farming he would have described himself as a livestock farmer. Now he describes himself as a passionate grower, and likes talking about potatoes, especially when he is educating the next generation of consumers.
He says: "I was recently involved in a video call with a local primary school. I was in the field and they were in the classroom, and I could see a forest of hands raised in the background. The children asked a lot of very sensible questions.''
Mr Simon enjoys supplying Blas y Tir. "It is nice to see our potatoes sold under the Blas y Tir brand, it has become one of the most recognised brands in Wales.
"We grow quality varieties. Yes, they might yield a bit less for us, but they are better tasting and that means that the consumer is more likely to repurchase.''
And there is an added pride that comes from producing those potatoes in a way that leaves the soils in a good place for future food production.
Blas y Tir in numbers
£1m - monthly retail sales
10,000 - 15,000 - annual tonnage of potatoes supplied by growers
20 - number of growers
80 per cent of Blas y Tir growers farm in Pembrokeshire and the remainder in the Vale of Glamorgan and the Wye and Usk Valley.
The champion product in the range is the Pembrokeshire early potato, which is supplied up until the beginning of September thanks to sequential planting.
Puffin Produce has also seen major growth in its Blas y Tir vegetable sales - in the last three years sales of supermarket trays have increased from 400-500 a week to 5,000-6,000.
Managing director Huw Thomas says that when Blas y Tir replaces British or imported products on the shelves of Welsh supermarkets, sales will always increase.
"Retailers will generally see a 20-30 per cent increase in sales which is achieved by putting good value for money products on the shelf and working in partnership with our retail partners,'' he says.
A Welsh government study on the value of ‘Welshness' has found that more than eight in 10 shoppers in Wales prefer to buy Welsh products.
"There is more support in Wales for local food than in any other UK region and that comes through in our sales figures,'' says Mr Thomas.
