-Alexander Lindsey
Potato harvest this year was spread over a few weeks beginning Thursday August 27th and finishing up Tuesday September 22nd. With the exception of the first trip, the harvests were conducted Tuesdays. Participants in the harvest were Dr. Wesley Everman’s technician Andy Chomas, graduate students Calvin Glaspie, Laura Bast, John Green, and me, as well as undergraduate workers Dan and Melissa. Most Tuesdays began around11:30am due to many of the students having class in the morning. Most days were reasonable in length, but September 22 was the latest night for harvest. With the help of Bruce Sackett, the farm manager at the Montcalm Research Farm in Lakeview and Chris Long, the Potato Agronomist, we were able to harvest 14 studies that had been planted. For most of the plots we used a single row harvester which dug the tubers and brought them on a conveyer to an area where we could remove the rocks that were of similar size. The “rock picking” conveyor then transported the potatoes to a shoot where burlap sacks were placed to catch the tubers. A few of the studies had to be handpicked, so a machine that dug a single row was pulled behind a tractor. This piece of equipment brought the potatoes up and left them on the soil surface. We would then walk down the row and put the tubers into burlap sacks by hand. Due to a low area in the field and copious amounts of rain this season, one of the studies had to be discarded due to lack of marketable tubers in half the plots. The rest of the studies on the farm were more successful. Once the plots had been harvested, the crew graded them into separate categories (A, B, oversize, pickout) and quantified internal defects. As of now, we are working at completing the data analysis.
