Driving impression: Grimme Tectron four-row potato harvester Is four the future? Grimme reckons that potato growing is increasingly becoming the preserve of the professional largescale grower, and in direct response has launched its Tectron four-row SP bunker harvester to meet this market shift. Martin Rickatson casts an eye over the first machine demoed in the UK last year
Potato harvesters don’t come a lot bigger than Grimme’s Tectron 415. Launched hot on the heels of the firm’s first SP beet harvester last year, the Tectron takes a number of design cues from its ‘sugar’ sibling, resulting in a machine that throws away the spud harvester rulebook in a number of areas.
Four-row spud harvesting clearly demands even greater emphasis on accuracy when beds are being formed, with two bedformer bouts needing to be precisely matched. But Grimme still believes that the demand from growers wanting to switch to such a system is there, as is the GPS guidance which can help create millimetre-perfect beds.
It takes only the briefest of glances at the big Tectron’s profile to realise that there is something different about the way that the 415 digs its spuds. Grimme has had a rethink on machine layout for the new four-row. First up comes the topper, a fixed unit which is demounted and trailed lengthways for road transport, and is equipped with a cross-conveyor. Grimme says a new folding unit was considered, but this was decided to be too costly as well as impractical to develop. The topper for our test machine, though, was not actually fitted, this particular Tectron having been shipped over from France for demonstration. No matter, as our crop had been pre-topped.
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