CARIBOU — Maine potato growers held a steady course Monday, beginning the second week of street prices at $16.50 to $18 per barrel and establishing a price record for this early in the shipping season.

Prices of count cartons, 50-pound boxes of sized russets, stood at a Maine seasonal record of $31 to $34 per 100 pounds, an increase from $22 three weeks ago, according to Wayne Smith of the Potato Marketing Advisory Office of the Maine Department of Agriculture.

While the country’s fall-producing potato states were short 9 million hundredweight of potatoes compared to a year ago, Maine was in the enviable position on March 1 of having relatively low supplies but almost a half-million hundredweight more potatoes than a year earlier.

“We’ve got more potatoes to sell at higher prices,” said Smith.

Potato industry officials predicted earlier that national supplies were going to be so short that growers were sitting on a price time bomb that was sure to go off.

In Idaho, the price on count cartons was even higher than in Maine — $40 to $41 per hundredweight after having been $24 to $25 three weeks earlier.

Smith credited the price boom to “a nationwide potato shortage created by the drought last summer in the Midwest, plus record processing usage.”

Maine’s street barrel prices were hemmed in by the more popular Western russet market at the end of last month, at $13 to $14 for produce costing $10 to $11 to grow. The country’s potato shortage by last week enabled Maine’s price to leap forward, Smith said.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Smith. “Usually a $1 increase on count cartons in a week is doing well. I’ve never never seen anything like this before.”