Potato Grower Spotlight: Graeme Mackie

Graeme Mackie and his family farm 80 hectares of seed potatoes in Turriff, Aberdeenshire and finished planting their crops for 2022 in May. They have a strong export market, trading primarily with Egypt, and believe passionately in on-farm trials. In our newsletter today, we focus on this part of their business but tune in to the podcast to find out more about the business.

“We are predominately arable, growing winter wheat, winter oilseed rape and spring barley for our local malting markets. However, our main crop is 80 hectares of seed potatoes.

We have been planting in some lovely dry soils, actually probably drying out a little too much at the end of the planting season but we’ve had ten days of mixed weather which has been good. It's dampened down the beds and the drills, to allow us to get the pre-emergence herbicides on, and in the last few days, we’ve had some heat and sun. The first potatoes are well on to emergence, and once they get those first few leaves through the ground, and with our long daylight hours up here in the North-East of Scotland, they will soon be “stringing up the drills” as they say.

It has been a blow to the Scottish seed industry losing the access to the European market, there's no doubt about that. Directly we were putting a very big tonnage into Europe, but of course that has a knock-on effect when our trading markets are closed. ? growers are starting to look at alternative routes, which then puts pressure on those markets that are still available to access.

It's allowed us to have a greater focus on our home market. For the last five to ten years, we have been focused on exports, but the change has allowed us all to value the market that is on our doorstep and appreciate the varieties that are suitable for the English market. The Scottish seed industry grows a great product, and good quality seed potatoes will always find a market.

Growing potatoes is never without a challenge, that’s for sure. Probably the biggest issue for the whole industry at the moment is the loss of actives, and we are trying to fight a battle with pests and diseases with less and less available. It means you have to look at other means of control, and there is a lot of good trial working going on at the moment, whether wildflower strips within a field, straw mulch going down on beds or mineral oils.

Last year was our first field scale trial with Honesty, a BASF seed treatment. We had some very encouraging results. We found good control on rhizoctonia with no significant levels of black scurf, and we thought the tubers had a brightness to them, a shine that our other farm standard didn’t. So, this season we are trying it again and will keep monitoring them through the season.

This blog appeared in the Perfecting Potatoes Together June 2022 Newsletter. To subscribe to this monthly newsletter, set up your BASF My Services account and subscribe to the Real Results Email Service choosing potatoes as a preference.