Storage controls

3 April 1998

Storage controls

TWO-STAGE harvesting is an excellent weapon in the potato growers battle against disease.

Now engineers need to help maintain the advantage in store.

"The aim must be to get potatoes into store carrying as few disease organisms as possible," SAC crop health specialist Stuart Wale told the conference. Two-stage lifting can achieve that. But engineers must now provide a control system to alter the in-store environment at the potato surface very quickly.

"Different diseases need different conditions in which to thrive and the system should be capable of changing the environment rapidly to counter whatever challenge is there," he said. &#42