Last week we made the first delivery of 4-row Spapperi Inter Plant Weeders. It was a proud moment for JF Hudson Ltd as I think how it all started with the Pumpkinator, the prototype pumpkin weeder we built back in 2017.
Necessity is the mother of invention and the need to gain control of weeds in the pumpkin patch led to the inception of the Pumpkinator. Weed management is essential to produce the best yields and highest possible crop quality. As pumpkins and squash are delicate, weeds can overpower young plants quickly. This can severely hamper your chances of growing a bumper crop. Traditional weed control methods like spraying are not an option in order to protect pumpkin plants from herbicide damage. That leaves manual hand hoeing which is time consuming and tedious when you have acres to tackle.
Pumpkinator took some refining but ultimately it made weeding quite satisfying. There appeared to be demand for a weeding machine. It was far from straightforward doing the research to work out if there was a market for the machines, but it has been worth it. I approached Spapperi, requesting a meeting at the EIMA International trade show in October 2018. We met at the show in Bologna, and I was delighted that they agreed to JF Hudson Ltd becoming the exclusive dealer for the UK.
The fact that we now sell to producers growing up to 1,000 acres of pumpkins is more than I anticipated. I certainly never expected the first machine to be sold to someone growing rhubarb! Having set-out with a focus on pumpkins and squash producers, we now supply the Spapperi weeders to growers of artichokes, courgettes, brassicas, soft fruit (strawberries and raspberries), rhubarb, Christmas trees, cut flowers (agapanthus, peonies and polygonatum). Some producers use their machine across crops (e.g. strawberries and courgettes).
I am still impressed by the capability and range of the Spapperi machinery in that whether it is the single row model or a 4-row, it works with the same efficiency. Its consistency is a real bonus on several fronts: staffing and ground conditions.
Getting hold of staff is difficult but finding staff who want to do hand hoeing is harder still. The weeder offers consistency from one end of the day to the other, the quality of weeding stays the same. It significantly reduces the man hours spent on weed control. One producer has calculated using a weeder gives him a 40% labour saving on manual hoeing.
The weeders are also happy dealing with different soil conditions. The first machine we sold works in sand weeding around rhubarb, but most are used in ground with a fair bit of clay content and stone. As a result of the pandemic, last year we started growing a small area of pumpkins ourselves given that we were unable to go out demonstrating. The weeder I used was dealing with a lot of stone and it was pretty savage, but it never faltered.
Trying to find out if the weeders were a goer or not wasn’t that easy but it certainly has been satisfying.
