stage experiences Guillaume Pennec 

As part of my training in the 2nd year of undergraduate diploma in agricultural techniques and farm management, I worked 5 weeks at the farm Van Den Borne Aardappelen. The aim of this work experience was to improve my English skills, and to learn other ways of working. In the first week, my main activity was to scan several fields with the Dual EM 21S soilscanner. Since Jacob offers soil scans for his seed potato growers, I even went to Groningen and Emmeloord, which was a great opportunity to get an impression of the Dutch landscape. It was very interesting because I did not know this type of soil conductivity analysis. Then, during the next 2 weeks, when the early potatoes were harvested, I was driving the loader at the farm to load the harvested potatoes to the hopper. Furthermore, I was in the field with the tractor and the trailer to transport the harvest to the farm. I enjoyed it very much! In the last week I participated in the sampling and calibration of potatoes, since the trial fields and especially the last probing round took a great effort. It was quite a lot of work to find out the starch content, size, length etc. of the potato samples, but rewarding! I also went to Potato Europe at Emmeloord with Jacob. It was very interesting because there were demonstrations of harvesting of potatoes with all the brands of machines.

During my internship I discovered and learned a lot of things, especially new techniques in the field of precision agriculture. If you want to discover the farm and its operation, I recommend you to go here on training course.

I thank Jacob and Jan, as well as all the members of the company for this time spent in Van Den Borne Aardappelen.