At a time when potato and other specialty crop farmers face a multitude of challenges in an increasingly competitive market, some relief came this week from USDA to the tune of $2.5 billion dollars. To learn more about the current climate of challenges and opportunities for U.S. potato growers, The Packer spoke Wednesday with Kam Quarles, CEO of the National Potato Council and a co-chair of the Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance.
Editor’s note: The following has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve described the combined USDA’s Farm Service Agency’s Marketing Assistance for Specialty Crops (MASC) and the reconciliation bill or “Big Beautiful Bill’s” $2.5 billion cash allocation to specialty crops as “mind blowing.” Let’s start with MASC. What can you tell us about how this came to be and how it’s impacting farmers?
Quarles: This all started in back in November of last year. Congress recognized that growers — Title 1 growers, or what we call the program crops — were dealing with some historic economic challenges around production of their commodities. That economic environment was the exact same one that the specialty crop industry was facing.
The problem was that Congress just didn’t have the money to deliver disaster relief payments both to the program crops and to fruits and vegetables. And so, what some creative folks on Capitol Hill, as well as down at the Department of Agriculture, did was use USDA’s existing authority to deliver what’s called the Marketing Assistance for Specialty Crops program. It’s using their existing authority to deliver disaster relief payments just for specialty crops.
An initial round of payments went out around the first of the year [and then] more money was injected because the problem got bigger. With the change in administration, those payments were paused for a period of time. But about two weeks ago, [Agriculture] Secretary [Brooke] Rollins announced that the second round of payments would come out.
They are being delivered to producers right now at light speed. All this week, I’ve been getting reports of folks getting those payments, and they’re coming at the perfect time for specialty crops, helping a lot of family farms in the potato industry. But it’s really broader than that — it’s fruit and vegetable farms across the U.S.
What are you hearing from farmers in terms of monies received and are you aware of a time frame for which the funds will be distributed?
The announcement was made about 10 days ago, and within 48 working hours I was hearing of producers receiving payments in their bank accounts. In federal government terms, that is faster than light speed. So, a huge credit to Secretary Rollins and also the entire team at the Farm Service Agency.
What were these relief funds in response to?
It was really a combination of things, but the simplest explanation is that five years ago when the economy slammed shut for COVID and then turned back on, the market corrected, then over corrected, and since then has been very chaotic. Things like inputs, fertilizer, crop protection tools, finding equipment to be able to ship your product — all of those things have just created a lot of volatility across the supply chain. And the program crops and the specialty crops are feeling it.
How has the “Big Beautiful Bill” impacted specialty crops in general and potatoes specifically?
It’s pretty amazing. You look at a six-day window in July, [where] you had these mass payments come out and you had an historic investment in specialty crops. And when it was all said and done, you had about $2.5 billion dollars between MASC and these farm bill enhancements that was injected into the specialty crop industry.
It is really impressive to see, for an industry that just really doesn’t see those type of investments very often, to have that all come in at one time and all in very necessary places, like for ag research, for foreign market promotion, for pest and disease eradication, for specialty crop block grant funding — all of these things coming into an industry that has been starving for them for a very long time.
Have specialty crops ever seen this level of federal funding before?
The short answer is no. These investments are now in place for things like the Specialty Crop Research Initiative, the Market Access Program, the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program at the highest levels they have ever been. It’s really a historic level of funding.
If you go back 20 years ago, specialty crops had no programs in the farm bill. They were on the outside looking in. And now we’re at the highest levels we’ve ever seen. It’s very gratifying for an industry that’s never been more competitive, more volatile.
Let’s turn to tariffs. On Monday, President Trump sent letters communicating steep tariffs on certain countries, including 25% tariffs on Japan. When you and I spoke at Potato Expo in January, you said the U.S. potato industry has been keen to break into the Japanese market for years. How might these tariffs impact that aim?
I’m going to take the optimistic path here. I think these announcements that have come out in the last few days are encouraging interaction between both the Japanese and U.S. governments. When all is finalized, I don’t think that Japan is going to be facing 25% tariffs. I think both sides are going to get together and come up with a constructive settlement.
We want as part of that settlement for Japan, finally, to commit to opening its market to fresh potato exports from the United States. Again, the opportunity here is about $150 million a year in new U.S. ag exports to Japan.
We first made this request over 30 years ago, and it has really gone nowhere in the intervening time. Having potatoes as a piece of these negotiations will be a huge positive, both for U.S. growers — the exporters — but also for Japanese consumers and even Japanese farmers, because the demand in Japan far outstrips their domestic ability to supply that market. Japan doesn’t allow imports of fresh potatoes from anywhere in the world.
I would have been much more concerned if, if there wasn’t any indication of future negotiations, and that letter coming out to me was an invitation by the administration for Japan to sit down with them and figure this out.
At a press conference Tuesday, Secretary Rollins said that mass deportations will continue and there will be “no amnesty” for agricultural workers. How has the immigration crackdown impacted the potato industry labor force?
At the beginning of the administration, the understanding was that they were going to prioritize people who were criminals — clearly violent offenders who should never have been in the United States in the first place — and that farmworkers, who are out there creating great benefit for all American consumers every single day, were certainly not going to be at the top of that deportation list.
Things evolved over the past six or seven months, and we’re starting to see some raids on farms. It’s a challenging situation and a reality check for everyone who wants to talk about ag labor, but never really wants to involve themselves in it.
Congress has not been able to come to any type of settlement on how to deal with ag labor reform. You have had this massive group of improperly documented — they’re not undocumented — they’re improperly documented folks doing the work that benefits all of us every single day.
The folks who want to come up with some magical, easy solution believe that there’s some group of Americans out there who will do this work at the drop of a hat or there is some robot that is going to be turned on and dumped out in a field and will start harvesting any manner of commodities instantaneously — all of those solutions are fantasies.
There is no solution here to when you have the needs of 60% of labor dependent agriculture being performed by people who might get deported tomorrow. That is a recipe for every American to suffer if Congress, if the administration, don’t get together and solve this problem.
If the president will lean into ag labor reform, and shoot, he is a beneficiary. He’s a user of the H-2A program in some of his agricultural operations — his wineries. If the president will lean into that, he can generate a historic victory on something that everybody has been trying to move the needle on for decades. This hasn’t been seriously addressed since Ronald Reagan. President Trump has the ability to address this, but there is no magic, easy button here. This is going to take improvements in the H-2A program. It’s going to take serious discussion of how you deal with an enormous improperly documented labor force.
It is not the most complicated thing in the world to draw up the policy. The complicated part is generating the political will. That’s where we’ve lost over the past 20 years. The president can bring that political will back, and we’re very hopeful that he’s going to lean in, in a constructive way, on this.
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