Palletisers take the strain out of potato handling

Mervyn and Richard Toll grow around 45 acres of potatoes on prime Fenland silt at King John Farm, Sutton Bridge. Whilst the land has failed to yield the aforementioned King’s lost treasure, it does produce around 1000 tonnes of potatoes annually. They have recently installed an Oldenhuis & Prinsen palletiser with a view to increasing this throughput and, more importantly to save their aching backs!

Palletisers have become recognised as a major contribution to labour saving in vegetable handling operations. They have gained additional popularity as trailer manufacturers increased the payload capacity of their curtain-siders and container wagons while the Health and Safety Executive restricted manual stacking to shoulder height. So while a trailer may now take stacks of potato bags up to 10 or 13 layers high, manual operations are restricted to eight.

Oldenhuis & Prinsen machines are designed with easy to use controls allowing the operator to adjust the machine to suit individual applications, without the need of a service engineer.

Potato bagging at M J Toll previously involved four people including Richard’s mother Brenda. Now Richard and his father can cope… and Brenda is happy! Apart from making life easier, Richard explains that the palletiser has introduced the flexibility to respond to orders. Before it could take 48 hours to recruit temporary staff and then they would expect minimum of a week’s employment, both impacting on service and cost efficiency. Their main customers are Nationwide Produce, Anthony Swift Potatoes, Vic Graham Potatoes and Isle of Ely produce, many of the potatoes destined for fish and chip or local stores.

As there was not an existing 3 phase supply to the building, the power supply is split so that a generator supplies 3-phase power to the motors and single phase from the mains to protect the computer from pulse surges from the generator.

Richard says that Gary Palmer of David Harrison was very helpful in advising the best course of action and is happy that the new palletiser has been incorporated into their small packhouse scheme with so little disruption. Besides the palletiser, Harrisons installed a bag kicker to ensure a smooth flow of bags to the O&P machine.

David Harrison Handling Systems of Aldreth near Ely have extended their palletiser offering by the introduction of Symach high volume machines whose 3 models give throughputs between 10 and 37 tonnes per hour*, the perfect complement to the popular O&P palletiser with average daily output of up to 9 tonnes an hour.

Both OP and Symach automatic palletisers will happily stack up to thirteen layers of 25kg bags all day long without any risk of back strain…or exhaustion.

*based on 25 Kg bags.