Czech Republic: The harvest of potatoes for starch production in southern Bohemia has been delayed
Some farmers in southern Bohemia have not yet harvested all their potatoes. In some places, it rained more in the autumn and water is still standing in the furrows.
I walk through one of the potato furrows near Olešná in the Písek region with farmer Jindřich Kalous. He shows me how potatoes grow from the roots and says that this is how you can tell they want to get out of the ground.
"On this field, which is nineteen hectares, fifteen are still unharvested. And it’s not just here, but also in other places where we have, for example, 25 percent unharvested," he describes České Budějovice for Czech Radio. The problem is not just the location.
"The soil is not draining on the belts, the potatoes are waterlogged and cannot be removed from the ground. We would need the soil to dry out, a breeze to blow and no precipitation," he says. The water has been standing in the fields for quite some time. "We started harvesting at the beginning of September and despite the excessive precipitation, we simply cannot harvest it at all," describes Jindřich Kalous.
Even though the potatoes stay in the ground for a longer period of time, their quality has not yet been reduced. "These are starch potatoes and they are not at all bad in the row. So if they stay there for another fortnight or a month, nothing happens at all. They are better than in a pile," he explains.
Otherwise, he is satisfied with this year’s potato harvest. "If we manage to harvest potatoes, it won’t be a bad year. There was enough rainfall in the summer and the potatoes grew bigger this year compared to previous years and the harvest will be good," he boasts.
The weather is complicating the end of the starch potato harvest in other places as well. " Farmers in the Strakonice region or in the Vysočina region, where there has been more rainfall this autumn, have not yet harvested potatoes for starch production. However, there are only a few such producers in the Czech Republic. And if they fail to harvest the potatoes on time, they will unfortunately have to plow them," adds Josef Králíček, chairman of the Czech Potato Association.
If there are no major frosts in December, farmers can harvest potatoes for starch production at the end of the year.
Fuente: irozhlas.cz
