BOISE, Idaho — Potato farmers in Idaho and elsewhere in the United States have cut acreage by nearly 10 percent this year and are instead planting more corn, wheat and barley to take advantage of escalating grain prices and to avoid a market-crunching spud glut.
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 now 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 up 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 the signature crop of Idaho, where the “Famous Potatoes” slogan still graces the state’s license plate. A 10-pound bag of potatoes runs about $15, up some $6 from last year, according to the Idaho Potato Commission.
“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 Idaho’s Snake River plain or Washington state’s fertile Columbia Basin were often forced to unload millions of pounds of superfluous tubers, sometimes burying them beneath the fields where they’d grown so they could freeze to mush.
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, said from his Salt Lake City offices.
Staff at the cooperative, which some compare to an OPEClike 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.
In Idaho and elsewhere, several factors this year have helped steer potato farmers toward other crops.
French fry demand has slipped in the United States, Frankel said.
And potatoes require higher fuel and fertilizer expenditures than does grain, making switching to an alternative more attractive. For instance, Mark Coombs, a potato farmer in southwestern Idaho, cut his potato acreage and boosted corn production by 25 percent this year.
“Three-and-a-half years ago I paid 44 cents a gallon for a tanker full of diesel,” Coombs said. “This year I paid $4.15 a gallon. Fertilizer is doing the exact same thing.”
What’s more, Idaho’s burgeoning dairy industry also has increased production by 40 percent to more than 1 billion gallons in the five years through Dec. 2006. There were more than 500,000 dairy cows in the state last year, up from 475,000 a year earlier, spurring farmers in traditional tuber country to grow more and more corn silage and hay.
In addition, farmers in the state have watched demand for their barley rise.
Typically grown on Idaho’s high, arid plain running north from Pocatello to the Wyoming and Montana borders, barley is sent to malting operations including Mexican beer brewer Grupo Modelo S.A.B. de C.V.’s $84 million plant in Idaho Falls, which opened in 2005 next to a similar 17-year-old facility owned by the maker of Budweiser.
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