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Potato growers face challenges
Combination of
price cut and rising
production costs puts
premium on quality,
yields from 2021 crop
unpalatable option, although they
didn’t make nearly as much as
they would have from potatoes, did
make a small profit from their hast-
ily planted crops rather than taking
a potential loss of hundreds of dol-
lars per acre.
RETAIL MARKET, FAST-FOOD
RESTAURANTS RECOVER
RAPIDLY
By JAYSON JACOBY
Baker City Herald
A
year ago, Mark Ward
was worried about the
potato crop he was pre-
paring to plant in the
Baker Valley fields his family has
farmed for many decades.
Today he’s somewhat more
confident.
And not a little relieved that the
COVID-19 pandemic didn’t pre-
cipitate the economic disaster that
seemed plausible, even probable, in
March and April of 2020.
Still and all, Ward doesn’t
expect the ups and downs to level
out.
“Roller coaster ride is how I
would describe the last 12 months,”
Ward said in late March 2021.
The stomach-churning drop
started just about a year ago.
With the nation — indeed, the
world — reeling from the unex-
pected arrival of the new virus,
restaurants either closed or offered
takeout meals only.
Sporting events were canceled.
People stopped traveling, which
meant the drive-thru lanes of fast-
food restaurants, at least for a
while, weren’t nearly as congested
as usual.
With nobody watching games
from the bleachers, and few if any
people sitting at tables and booths
in restaurants, the demand for
French fries and other processed
potato products plummeted.
“In March and April there was
a big dip,” said Ward, who is the
chairman of the Oregon Potato
Commission.
The uncertain and unprece-
dented situation provoked anxi-
S. John Collins/Baker City Herald, File
Ward Ranches potatoes are being conveyed along the sorting table in front of Crystal Bork, right, Sandy Thom-
as, center, and Heather Carter during a previous year’s harvest.
ety among potato farmers, he said.
They wondered not only whether
there would be a market for the
potatoes they had just planted or
were preparing to plant — the
Ward family sows its fields at the
start of May — but they worried
too about potatoes in storage.
“When restaurants closed, pro-
cessors made some drastic cuts,”
Ward said.
In some places, although not in
Baker Valley, farmers had to plow
under potatoes they had planted
because potato processors severely
cut production, Ward said.
Just a few growers in the
Columbia Basin had to take that
unusual step and sow a different
crop in place of the recently planted
potatoes, said Dale Lathim, execu-
tive director of Potato Growers of
Washington.
Because the growing season
is much longer in the Columbia
Basin than in Baker Valley — the
latter being more than 2,000 feet
higher in elevation — potato farm-
ers in the Basin plant their crop
in late February or early March,
Lathim said.
That meant they had seed pota-
toes in the ground when the pan-
demic started and processors
slashed their production volume by
about 20%, he said.
Some affected growers chose
to raise the 2020 potato crop with-
out a contract and hope they could
sell the spuds on the open market,
Lathim said.
A few plowed under the pota-
toes and planted other crops.
Fortunately, Lathim said, the
farmers who chose the latter,
The precipitous drop in demand
for frozen potatoes prompted by
the pandemic was relatively brief.
Ward said the market “recov-
ered nicely” by June 2020, driven
in part by demand for potatoes,
both fresh spuds and frozen pro-
cessed products such as fries, at
grocery stores.
“People were eating at home,
relearning to cook at home,” he
said. “That was definitely a bright
spot. There was a tremendous
increase in sales at grocery stores.”
Ward said he was gratified at
how rapidly the industry adjusted
from supplying potatoes to the
restaurant and food service indus-
try, which buy in larger quanti-
ties, to the different demands of the
retail sector.
“Kudos to everyone in the indus-
try,” Ward said. “They got products
onto the shelves at the retail level.”
The “panic-buying” that was a
symbol of the early days of the pan-
demic — although toilet paper, not
potatoes, was the most infamous
of the hoarded products — helped
too, Ward said.
“I talked to people who, for
about two weeks, couldn’t find a
potato in the grocery store,” he
said.
Lathim said he wasn’t surprised
that grocery sales of potatoes sky-
rocketed after restaurants closed or
were severely limited.
“With the restaurant option
taken off the table, so to speak,
French fries and other convenience
foods flew off the shelf,” he said.
See Potato, Page 21