Spud Glut

The Pacific Northwest is sweating out a tough year. The problem? Too many ‘taters.

The wholesale price of baking potatoes is less than half of what it was last year. That’s not good news in Oregon, Washington and Idaho--the states that account for almost half the potatoes grown in the United States.

The problem stems from Idaho’s 1993 harvest, which was smaller than normal because an unusual combination of conditions caused the potatoes to expand quickly late in the growing cycle, causing what potato farmers call “hollow heart”--the potatoes grew so fast the insides didn’t fill out.

This caused a shortage, driving the price of Idaho potatoes up. Since the price of other states’ potatoes are pegged to Idaho’s, some farmers outside Idaho made a lot of money. And that encouraged them to grow more potatoes.

Oddly, it’s not the farmers who have been the worst hit by this year’s glut. The per-acre yield has been so high that farmers have had a lot of potatoes to sell; many have been able to make up on volume what they have lost on lower prices. In this case, it’s the middlemen, who buy on annual contracts, who are getting stretched.

“This whole year has been a disaster,” says Bob Keegan, owner of Keegan Inc., a fresh-pack potato company in Twin Falls, Idaho. (“Fresh pack?” Keegan says. “That means we pick ‘em, wash ‘em, size ‘em, grade ‘em, market ‘em and hopefully get paid for them.”)

The 1994 harvest started in the first week of August--two weeks earlier than ever before. “By the latter part of September,” Keegan says, “this thing was just going south so fast we couldn’t stop it from collapsing.”

What’s more, he says, the 1995 harvest, which should start for the premium Russet Burbank variety in mid-September, also looks big--most farmers did well enough in ’94 to replant the same acreage.