Innovation is the name of the game for Ireland’s largest broccoli producer. Gemma Mackenzie paid Paul Brophy Produce a visit to find out more
From a five-acre mixed vegetable operation in 1983, Paul Brophy Produce has grown to become the largest broccoli grower in Ireland growing just shy of 600 acres of the crop.
That’s in addition to around 100 acres of cabbage as well as some specialist tender-stem broccoli, which is destined for Lidl.
The business, which is located near Naas in County Kildare, is very much focused on using the latest technology to boost efficiency and cut costs.
Founder Paul Brophy said the bulk of business growth has taken place in the past five years, with many of the new ideas and methods adopted found during visits to foreign growers including some over in Scotland, Holland and Spain.
An example of overseas ties is the move to grow 1million, of the 12million starter plants used by the firm each year, in Spain.
“We used to have a big problem with the quality of our plants. We had lots of issues with the plants going blind and not growing well, and struggling with the temperatures,” said Mr Brophy.
“We now get these plants grown down in Spain and they get shipped up here. It gives us an edge and it gives us a better product when we start harvesting in June.”
And once more before the company’s new packhouse was built three years ago, Mr Brophy went on trips to the UK and Holland to see what type of packhouses other growers were running.
He is now in the process of installing a new stock control system, at a cost of around £29,000, to monitor what is in the cold store, where it is and where it needs to go.
Boxes of harvested vegetables will each be labelled and tracked to prevent older crop being stored at the back of newer crop.
This follows on from a leap into precision farming technologies a few years ago.
Now the business, which grows around 60% of Ireland’s total broccoli output, uses variable rate spreading maps for fertiliser applications, which according to Paul, results in savings in both fertiliser costs and the fact a more uniform crop is produced at the end of the process.
In addition to precision technology for fertiliser, Mr Brophy plans to work with a cereals grower to carry out yield mapping for each field.
“Head quality for us is our biggest issue so we like to see the plants running out of fertilisers and steam just as we come into harvest,” said Mr Brophy.
“We try and take a more scientific and justified reason for every application [of fertiliser].”
The company’s crop production manager, Brendan Gorman, said another focus of precision technology was planting the most amount of plants per hectare using GPS line drills. In fact all plants are put in the ground in a diamond pattern to fit more in.
“It does it with uniformity across the field and that makes it easier for the planter who follows the drills,” said Mr Gorman, who said planting was now down by a Ferrari machine, giving a more even spread of crops.
After delving into precision drills, the business then bought a 24-metre hardy commander i-sprayer in 2013, before getting an intellisteer tractor for working on GPS.
This year another intellisteer tractor was bought alongside a new fertiliser spreader.
And when all the technology is merged together, with the information crunched on a smart computer software system, Mr Gorman believes the traceability of the crop is much better.
Next year he said there were plans to purchase steerage hoe technology, which identifies and pulls out individual weeds.
“That will have huge advantages and should help with plants which had oilseed rape in the field before,” said Mr Gorman.
After the crop has been harvested, it goes through a rigorous checking and packing process at the packhouse, which during peak season employs around 80 people.
Mr Brophy said the target weight is 500g for each head.
“We supply all the major multiples here [Ireland} and we are the only supplier to Aldi in Ireland,” he added.
When asked about future plans, Mr Brophy said the focus was on continuing to maximise the use of new technology to improve efficiency all the time.