Idaho’s No. 1 Industry Is No Small Potatoes

Scott Davenport walked up the wooden steps to the top of a pile of potatoes 18 feet high, 300 feet long and 70 feet wide. He wanted to see how the spuds were doing.

The 12.5-million-pound pile is one of eight similar mountains being stored in two huge warehouses at the J. R. Simplot Co. potato-processing plant in Caldwell, 25 miles west of Boise.

Southern Idaho is dotted with such potato storage houses operated by Simplot, Carnation and Ore-Ida. They currently hold 6 billion pounds, or about 69% of the “famous potatoes” produced in this state in 1986.

Davenport, field department manager for Simplot’s Caldwell operation, was atop the pile looking for signs of bad spuds. He cut open several.

“Potatoes are like humans. They are living organisms like you and me. Some get sick. Some die. We constantly monitor the piles in storage and remove the sick and dying,” he explained.

Giant pipes force air throughout the potato piles; temperature is kept at a constant 46 degrees and humidity between 95% and 100%. The two Simplot warehouses hold 100 million pounds of potatoes.

Shrinkage Cut

In storage, the moisture inside evaporates and potatoes shrink. Environmental controls in the warehouses have cut such shrinkage from 10% to 15% of weight as recently as five years ago to about 5% today.

Potatoes grown in Idaho are planted in spring, harvested in fall and then held in storage from winter until as late as July. They are processed over a 10-month period to ensure even supply and distribution.

More than 5 billion pounds of potatoes produced in the United States are turned into french fries for the U.S. fast food industry, and Simplot says its six plants represent 30% of that market.

In fact, half the potatoes grown in America--65% of those in Idaho--are made into french fries, potato chips or frozen or dehydrated products. The potato chip industry alone accounts for over 1 billion pounds a year.

A third of the nation’s potatoes wind up in supermarkets and grocery stores to be sold fresh. The rest go for seed or cattle feed.

Potatoes are Idaho’s No. 1 industry, and Idaho is America’s biggest potato state. Even the state’s license plate proclaims: “Idaho--famous potatoes.”

One-fourth of all the potatoes in America come from southern Idaho. In 1986, the state produced 8.73 billion pounds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Washington ranked second with 6 billion pounds, Oregon third with 2.3 billion pounds, North Dakota fourth with 2.16 billion pounds and Maine fifth with 2.1 billion pounds. Total potato production in the United States in 1986 was 35.55 billion pounds.

“Potato prices this year are considerably higher than in 1985,” noted Arvin Budge, 58, who maintains the nation’s potato statistics for the USDA in Washington. “Prices have rebounded from last year, creating a strong, healthy situation for farmers.”

Prices this year have averaged $4.50 per hundred pounds, compared to last year’s average of $3.92. The highest price ever paid for potatoes was $5.69 per hundred pounds in 1984.

Every day, trucks roll into the huge Simplot warehouses at Caldwell with potatoes from other storage buildings, and every day potatoes are removed from the piles for processing.

As the potatoes are unloaded from truck-trailers onto conveyor belts that carry them to the storage plants, they are checked for quality, disease and frost damage.

“The potatoes are all raised by farmers under contract. If a shipment doesn’t meet our quality standards it isn’t accepted,” Davenport said. Rejected spuds usually wind up as cattle feed.

In Idaho, about 2,800 potato growers gross about $450 million a year for the raw product. But the total industry--including processing and distribution--employs more than 30,000 and is a billion-dollar business, according to the Idaho Potato Commission.

“It’s a difficult crop to grow,” said Doug Gross, 33, a second-generation Wilder, Ida., potato grower. “We have to go out every day and dig around the potatoes to see how they’re doing.”