Potato growers see record prices for small crop

FRENCHVILLE – Round white table stock potatoes are becoming rare in Aroostook County this year because prices were good in the fall and they stayed up through the selling season.

Storage sheds are getting depleted, way ahead of schedule. Growers have been shipping while the market is good.

Maine growers started the shipping season with a small crop, the smallest since the late 1880s. Those who remain in farming believe the small crop, with acreage down nationwide, helped farmers sell their crop. Maine has about 400 potato growers.

Compared with the last three and four years, which were disastrous for Maine growers, prices for potatoes were considered OK through the season.

Two weeks ago an industry newsletter reported the price for Maine round white potatoes at $1.40 to $1.50 per 10-pound bag. That averages out to $14.50 per hundredweight, an increase of 87 percent over a year ago.

Industrywide cuts in acreage are believed to have helped prices this year.

“Prices were decent, and that helped us,” Jim Pelletier of Frenchville said Tuesday. “We also had a lot better quality than we had last year.

“We have about five loads left, and others are like us or they are done shipping,” said the lifelong farmer. “It’s been a good year, and there was no reason to wait, or to hold potatoes.”

Pelletier, who grew up on his father’s farm, started farming with his two brothers, Philip and Danny Pelletier, 29 years ago. They grow hundreds of acres of potatoes in Frenchville and St. Agatha.

He remembers hauling potatoes and dumping them in the fields last year. This winter they hauled their potatoes to Eastern Seaboard markets.

Most growers have russets and seed left for spring planting. The prices have been so good that some farmers sold seed as table stock. That may cause some shortages of seed and higher prices in the spring.

Pelletier said his shipping crew has hardly stopped since they started shipping in late fall.

“This was my best year in farming,” he said. “It started good and stayed good with little or no price differences.

“We are not getting rich because prices for everything are so high,” he said. “With prices like this, farmers could live,” he said.

Maine’s potato crop is smaller following a North American trend in production cuts that made 11 percent fewer potatoes available in the market this year.

The Maine potato industry planted the smallest acreage since 56,000 acres were planted in 1888. Maine had 106,000 acres of potatoes in the ground as recently as 1982.

Maine farmers planted 55,500 acres. It was estimated that 2,775 of those acres may not be harvested. That leaves a harvest of 52,725 acres.

The decrease in North America is 125,000 acres.

This year’s crop in Maine was down more than 8,000 acres from last year’s 63,500 acres

“The North American decrease, in all honesty, was somewhat planned and somewhat just happening,” Don Flannery said earlier in the shipping season. “It’s the result of economics because there has been an oversupply of potatoes in this country for years.”

Flannery said in Maine the drop in acreage was brought about by people getting out of the business. Some growers could not get financing, and others who had been in the industry for years looked at retirement.

Overall, the cuts are good for the potato business.

Flannery, who could not be reached Tuesday, said earlier that growers were reporting good quality crops coming from the ground. Yields were also a bit smaller than last year’s record yields. Last year growers were getting as much as 310 hundredweight of potatoes to the acre, but this year’s crop is closer to the 10-year average of 285 cwt per acre.

In Canada, the North American Potato Market News, an industry newsletter, reported 16.8 million cwt less than a year ago. That includes 14.2 million cwt less in New Brunswick and 25 percent fewer potatoes expected to come out of Prince Edward Island.

The industry newsletter believes this year’s North American potato crop could be the smallest since 1991.