Spud growers reaping rare profits

PATTEN – Maine potato farmers who completed their harvest this month are looking at the best prices in years, giving a shot in the arm to growers who sell their potatoes on the open market.

The supply is down and the market price is the highest in a decade, said Mike Corey, the newly departed executive director of the Maine Potato Board.

“The growers need a boost,” Corey said. “For some of them, it will be the first time in many years that they’ve made money.”

Maine potato growers harvested an estimated 16 million hundredweight – or 16 billion pounds – of potatoes, which is a drop of about 10 to 15 percent from last year because of the dry summer and a slight drop in acreage.

But the size of the potatoes has been good and the quality has been superb, growers say.

Because of low supply nationwide, the price for a 10-pound bag of round white potatoes is currently a dollar, compared to 60 cents last year, said Jim Pelletier of Edwin Pelletier & Sons Inc. in Frenchville.

Pelletier said the higher prices are a relief after last year’s 40,000-acre increase and bumper crop in Idaho caused the prices to dip to the point that farmers in Maine were struggling.

“We were desperate on pricing. They were too cheap before. No table stock grower would survive at those prices,” he said.

The tendency in recent years has been for growers to seek out contracts with french fry plants, potato chip plants and other processors as a way of locking in prices to avoid wild fluctuations.

Sixty-five percent of Maine’s potatoes go to processing plants, compared with 10 percent for table stock sold in grocery stores. The other 25 percent are seed potatoes.

It’s part of a national trend. Farmers from Washington state to Maine have sought out contracts to get consistency in pricing, said Bud Middaugh, executive director of the National Potato Council.

“There’s usually more stability in contracts because the table market is up and down,” added Bruce Huffaker, president of North America Potato Market News in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

More Maine growers looked forward to signing onto contracts following announcements that potato processing plants would be built in Easton and Limestone. But McCain Foods and Lamb Weston put the projects on hold.

Processors need to see sustained growth before they build more plants because there is too much production capacity, Huffaker said.

The average American already consumes 59.5 pounds of french fries, tater tots, hash browns, potato chips and other processed potatoes each year, said Wendy Jenkins of the National Potato Promotion Board. That’s roughly double the annual consumption of fresh potatoes, she said.

Corey remains hopeful that market conditions will change, allowing the plants to be built and for potato acreage to grow in Maine. “Just because they aren’t building those plants today doesn’t mean they won’t be built,” he said.

Companies are interested in Maine in part because of the improved quality brought about by crop rotations, new equipment that has cut down on bruising and better storage techniques, Corey said.

Good quality is important to processors, Huffaker said. Processors have opened several plants outside the United States and Canada, but there have been quality problems with the potatoes in some areas, he said.