UK’s largest farmer installs Herbert Grading Line 

The Co-operative has been farming for over 100 years, ever since its first farm was bought to provide potatoes for its food stores. The Co-operative Farms is now the UK's largest farmer, farming around 60,000 acres across England and Scotland. Having been farming since 1896 it has seen significant changes in the industry, not least with the developments in technology.

As the largest farmer in the UK, the scale of The Co-operative Farms' business requires high quality, durable machinery.  Recently, The Co-operative refurbished a potato packing facility at Carnoustie, Scotland, which washes and packs potatoes for Co-operative stores throughout the UK.  Requiring reliable, robust and hard-working machinery for the new plant, The Co-operative Farms turned to Herbert Engineering, renowned throughout the world for providing such machinery to the vegetable processing industry.

After consulting with Bill Longair, Site Manager at the Carnoustie facility, Herbert set about designing and manufacturing a system to suit The Co-operative's requirements for the new potato packing plant.  The system installed at Carnoustie, an 1800 Grading and Box Filling Line, incorporates a Herbert Vertical Eject High Angle Box Tipper, hoppers, cleaners and grading lines leading into three Herbert GF2 Box Fillers.

The recently re-designed Vertical Eject Box Tipper provides an increased tip angle which gives total box emptying and tipping capacities of up to 24 cycles per hour, providing a consistently quick and efficient throughput which is essential at the busy Carnoustie packing facility.  After the potatoes have been through the grading process they arrive at the three GF2 Box Fillers, which like the Box Tipper have undergone recent design enhancements. The new GF2 Box Filler has an improved space saving footprint, whilst still providing a continuous filling operation with capacities of up to 50 tonnes per hour.

Herbert Freshpack Sales Manager David Austin commented, "We are delighted to have been given the opportunity to work with The Co-operative Farms.  As the UK’s largest farmer, standards and expectations are very high, and I am happy to say that the Herbert installation at Carnoustie has been a great success, delivering the quality expected from Herbert machinery and meeting The Co-operative’s production demands."

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