Potato Harvest

I was out in my car when I noticed activity up a side road and decided to go for a nosey. A big 10-acre-plus potato paddock was being harvested with a new machine. So many times I have had fists shaken at me when I’ve appeared with a camera that I approached hesitantly, but the three men welcomed me and waved me into the place where they were filling the spud boxes. They even offered me a ride on the big machine, but I was more interested in seeing what it did from the outside. I had a conducted tour, and saw how the harvester dug and lifted the potatoes and delivered them to either a spout/bag or to a box on the back. With one man driving the hauling tractor and two working on the machine large quantities of potatoes were quickly lifted and transferred to boxes.

Late last year I saw some home movies made in this district in the 1930s. Among the farm activities several years of the potato harvest were recorded. It was back-breaking, intensive work. The rows were dug with a horse-drawn implement (I’ve forgotten what), and teams of pickers followed, bent double, collecting the potatoes into buckets. The buckets soon filled so someone followed with a sack to empty them. The man-sized sacks were sewn closed, and hefted by one man onto the dray.

The big innovation back then was demonstrated by a gang of Maori pickers from the North Island. They didn’t use buckets, but put the potatoes straight into the bags, which they dragged behind them. They walked straddling the rows, with feet wide apart so that they didn’t have so far to bend. Needless to say, that’s how it was done after that.