Potato farmers cutting acreage

BOISE – Potato farmers in Idaho and elsewhere have cut acreage by nearly 10 percent this year to plant more corn, wheat and barley to take advantage of escalating grain prices. Potatoes for fall harvest were planted on less than 1 million acres, down 80,000 acres from 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In Idaho, which accounts for a third of all U.S. potatoes, acreage planted in brown-skinned Russet Burbanks and other varieties fell from 350,000 to 300,000, the lowest since Jimmy Carter was president.

United Potato Growers of America, a three-year-old agricultural cooperative that represents 60 percent of the nation’s fresh-potato growers, said efforts to reduce price-deflating surpluses that plagued the U.S. industry through 2004 are getting a boost from grains that have been trading on commodity markets at or near historically high prices.

“You have the combination of growers having alternative cash crops and they know they have to reduce potato planting to get supply in balance with demand,” said Jerry Wright, who heads United Potato Growers of Idaho in Idaho Falls, one of the national group’s nine cooperatives. “This is the year they’ve been able to do it.”

As a result, shoppers may pay more at the supermarket for Idaho’s signature crop.

“It’s not a shortage,” Wright said Tuesday. “It’s a balance. There’s going to be ample potatoes for everybody.”

Less than a decade ago, farmers who tilled the light volcanic soil of the Snake River plain or the fertile Columbia Basin were often forced to unload millions of pounds of superfluous tubers, sometimes burying them in the fields where they’d grown.

Since 2004, however, the United Potato Growers of America said its members have successfully reduced acreage sufficiently so that profitability is no longer just a dream that sprouts each spring but withers by harvest.

“It seems like this will be the first time since World War II that growers have had four years in a row of break-even or profitable production,” said Lee Frankel, the president and chief executive officer.

Staff at the cooperative, which some compare to an OPEC-like cartel bent on propping up prices, scheduled 12 seminars for its members in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado, Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota this February and March. There, they helped farmers determine how many acres could be planted with potatoes without overwhelming the market, as well as which alternative crops could be planted instead.

“We don’t look at this thing as a negative, because we want the growers to make money,” said Frank Muir, president and chief executive officer of the Idaho Potato Commission. “The positive side … is, because acreage is down, those growers who stayed in potatoes this year will benefit from higher prices.”