The FieldLoad Pro gives growers an all-in-one system for cleaning their spuds in field.
Getting your potatoes sparkly clean isn’t always easy. It requires hauling spuds from field to yard, putting them on a conveyor belt where workers physically pick through to find the bad spuds and junk that may have been picked up in the field. However, there is an easier way to get it done.
Four years ago, United Kingdom-based Tong Engineering released the FieldLoad Pro, an all-in-one spud cleaning machine. With it growers can clean potatoes and load them for shipping directly from the field, removing the step of having to haul potatoes back to the yard for cleaning and sorting.
The FieldLoad Pro is a mobile unit which is towed or transported from location to location. It has its own power supply allowing for quick setup — you park it in a field, unfold the legs, set it up, start the generator, and within 10 minutes it’s ready to go.
“When you want to pack up and move locations, you fold the machine up with a tractor, tow it to the next location… It’s one unit to worry about. It’s quite compact,” Charlie Rich, sales director for Tong Engineering, says in a Microsoft Teams interview.
Soil and debris from the spuds are cleaned on the FieldLoad Pro in field, with sizing of potatoes done onsite. A recent addition to it has been the option to add optical sorting, this allows for objects such as dirt clods and pieces of wood to be removed from the lot. Tong Engineering partnered with Tomra to incorporate their optical sorting capabilities into the machine’s design.
“Then you can load the semi from that from that point. So thus, leaving the soil in the field, leaving the debris in the field and any rotten product that you may not want to take away into the semi,” Rich explains.
There are pros to the all-in-one system. Labour costs are reduced as the optical sorting capabilities removes the step of having to physically pick through spuds. Disease spread is lowered as the infield dirt removal stops soil diseases from being transferred. The soil removal also reduces hauling costs as there’s less weight having to be trucked around.
The FieldLoad Pro was initially launched four years ago, with the first one in Canada sold in 2022 to a farm on Prince Edward Island. Reception has been good with the P.E.I. farm already wanting to order a second unit, Rich says.
“As soon as customers get one, and they have it compared to their old machinery, they like it because it’s so compact, because it’s a powerhouse of cleaning. It has our easy clean system in it… So very clean sample that comes off the end of it — it’s making their life easy,” he adds.
While there are companies that have products that offer cleaning and packaging services, Rich says no other has all these services contained in one unit.
Header photo — The FieldLoad Pro has everything on it to allow grower to clean potatoes in field. Photo: Tong Engineering
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