Golding Growers Get It Sorted

As a well-established and highly experienced company in the manufacturing industry, Herbert Engineering understands only too well the importance of greater efficiency and reduced labour costs to their customers. Herbert’s electronic grader, the Auto-sort, reduces labour requirements and increases quality by doing the 'hard work' of sorting defect potatoes by camera.

One grower in Lancashire recently invested in a de-stoner, washer and an Auto-sort. They have found that despite the really tough growing conditions they have been experiencing in recent months, they are still able to produce a quality product with only one main inspector and one final quality controller. Their working day has reduced in length and they are now self-reliant and have little need for gang workers.

Will and Mark Golding from Lancashire have 140 acres of potatoes, 70 acres of carrots and work with onions too. They harvest, clean, wash and pack for the wholesale market and also have a modern storage facility. The surprising thing is that they do all this with family members plus one hired hand totalling no more than five staff, showing that even smaller customers are reaping the long-term benefits of Herbert's knowledge and products.

‘The Auto-sort has made our farm more self reliant’, report Will and Mark Golding.

The Auto-sort configuration for Goldings is set up to sort the product into good, second grade and bad. According to Goldings “You hardly ever see a green come through. At the end of the day our mids are run through the Auto-sort on a good / bad program. The Autosort is so effective we have had to double the speed of the infeed conveyor because the inspectors have less to do”.

‘We used to have hired help to aid with inspection especially during periods with a high waste percentage coming through. Now our family can deal with the inspection no matter what conditions we have. We grade mids out and the rest of the product goes over the Auto-sort. It is great at identifying green potatoes and we would say on average it detects 95 per cent of greens.”

As a final comment, the Goldings remark, “The Herbert machine has reduced our hours in the packhouse each day and achieved this result with less people.”

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