With pressure mounting on farmers to optimise their production processes, finding areas where efficiency can be improved is a must.

Ensuring products get from the field to the market quickly and efficiently is vital for many farmers to avoid product spoilage. While packaging has traditionally been carried out by hand, periods of high demand can lead to higher workloads and an increasingly strained workforce.

This in turn can result in reduced packaging quality, leading to compromised products that could place consumers’ health at risk, alongside the farmer’s reputation.

When faced with growing quantities of produce to package, farmers may need to turn to more sophisticated solutions such as automated packaging to avoid these issues. A fully automated solution can quickly package products in automatic cycles for prolonged periods of time, to a consistent high level of quality.

By adopting automated packaging solutions such as flowrapping, traysealing or thermoforming machines, farmers could increase their business’s operational efficiency, providing a stable platform from which they can further expand their business at a lower cost.

For example, Southern England Farms, a Cornwall-based vegetable producer, replaced their inefficient packaging machinery with an automated flowrapping solution from ULMA Packaging. By doing so, the company was able to improve their packaging capacity and speed while minimising downtime, allowing it to meet its growing daily order demands and make efficiency savings.

Yet these benefits are not only enjoyed by larger companies – bespoke automated packaging solutions can be applied to existing lines at small-to-medium-sized businesses too. These solutions can be simply designed and trialled, avoiding stereotypes about the technology involving overly-complicated robotics. As a result, levels of production can be increased and manual handling reduced, allowing staff to be redeployed elsewhere to carry out more complex tasks.

In conclusion, farmers who switch over from traditional packaging lines to automated solutions may find they can lower operational costs while hugely increasing product output.

For more information contact Steve Craddock, Business Manager – Automation Projects at ULMA Packaging UK.