If you’re a potato grower, you may take a look at your weather-worn crops this summer and wonder to yourself what is the point of investing time and resources in an industry when a fickle climate can have such a devastating blow.
It’s a moot point - over the years it is BPC-funded research that has tailored blight programmes or helped you improve your irrigation scheduling. But perhaps your BPC levy would be better spent on ‘fire-fighting’ disease problems brought about by the weather.
Of course we cannot prepare for all vagaries of the weather. But how much do you know about how your money is spent, and can you be sure it is benefiting you?
BPC resources all its activities carefully and knowledge transfer is a good example - we don’t just fund research programmes, we make sure the results of those programmes are relayed to the industry in a form you can then use to ensure practical and tangible benefits.
We are also careful how we prioritise this activity. Money is spent where it will get greatest return in terms of industry benefit. And we ensure this by consulting regularly with growers, the supply chain and other industry stakeholders.
The result is a measured, planned and strategic approach to help you get a handle on the aspects of potato production you can control.
Our current priorities are areas such as blight, energy use in store, soil and water management, Erwinia chrysanthemi and crop uniformity.
Is this what we should be doing? Well, you tell us - those who have worked with us before and helped shape our programme will know that events like British Potato 2007, taking place in Harrogate on November 28 and 29, are good opportunities to discuss the activities we do on your behalf.
For those who haven’t, this is an ideal time to engage and get an introduction to the myriad of resources in these key areas that will help your business progress. As a first step, come to the seminars, where a good overview of each topic is given by the industry’s leading experts.
So are we actually achieving anything for the industry with these research programmes and the knowledge transfer activities that go with them? Let’s look at Chysanthemi, for example - it is apparent this is now becoming a huge problem on the continent, and one of growing importance here.
Yet it has been a measured, planned approach to researching and monitoring the disease, capitalising on national plant health expertise, that has given us the opportunity to introduce several new tools that address the current situation in a focused and thorough way - the Safe Haven scheme and the BPC guide ‘Managing the risk of Black leg’ are two good places to start.
They are robust and trust-worthy products of a co-ordinated research programme that have industry-wide endorsement.
We think that’s a better way of spending your money than being caught by surprise and adopting a fire-fighting approach.
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