A ‘beautiful’ Maine: Excellent potato crop expected

Volume of Maine’s 2022-23 potato crop should be similar to last season’s, and quality will be excellent, judging from early harvests.

“The crop looks beautiful this year,” said Bob Davis, vice president of Maine Farmers Exchange, Presque Isle, Maine.

Wet weather delayed spring planting a bit, but Davis expected growers to finish harvesting by mid-October.

“The size profile is going to be a little bit smaller than last year, but they’re going to be a good-size potato,” he said.

Shipments of table stock and seed potatoes should start the first week of November and continue until June.

Maine’s potato growers typically offer russet, white, yellow and red potatoes during the fall/winter season.

USDA reported 53,300 harvested acres of potatoes in Maine last season with total production of about 18.4 million cwt. Harvested acreage for the previous season was 50,800 acres with production of 13.4 million cwt.

Green Thumb Farms Inc., Fryeburg, Maine, has been shipping since the third week of August, said Mike Hart, director of sales and marketing.

“Our early-season round whites looked great,” he said. Despite drought conditions, growers were able to irrigate enough to achieve decent yields, but production of some varieties will be down, he said. “We just aren’t seeing the yields that we normally would get.”

Quality, however, should be “outstanding,” he said.

Caribou, Maine-based Irving Farms wrapped up its harvest Oct. 5, a bit earlier than usual thanks to good weather, said president Jeff Irving.

“It’s been an ideal harvest situation for us,” he said. “Conditions were perfect, and quality looks excellent.”

Sizing also should be good.

“We’ve been fortunate the last couple of years,” he said. “Our russets, especially, have a nice, strong size profile.”

Conditions also have been good at the Presque Isle location of South Easton, Mass.-based Cambridge Farms Inc. as the company starts its 40th year, said Ken Gad, president and owner. “Harvesting conditions have been outstanding,” he said. Daytime temperatures have ranged from the mid-60s to the low-70s, dipping into the 40s at night. “(Potatoes) should sweat out nicely and make a really nice quality crop this year,” he said.

Acreage of russet potatoes is rising as acreage of white potatoes falls, Gad said. “We’re not finding the demand for (white potatoes) as strong as there used to be,” he said.

A slow foodservice rebound

Maine potato suppliers do varying amounts of foodservice business, and all say sales are rebounding after the drop sparked by the COVID-19 restaurant closures.

Maine Farmers Exchange experienced a retail sales surge during the pandemic, but foodservice business “fell off a cliff,” Davis said. “It’s come back pretty good, but it’s not come back to what it was,” he said.

About 40% of Green Thumb Farms’ sales are to foodservice accounts, Hart said.

Many restaurants did not make it through the pandemic, he said. Business is slowly coming back, but there’s still a long way to go before pre-COVID-19 levels are reached, Hart said.

Labor seems to be a major problem, he said, with some local restaurants closing two or three days a week because of lack of workers.

Potato pricing pressures

As harvesting wound down, growers said it was still too soon to tell what potato prices will be this fall.

“There is no set pricing we go in with,” Irving said. “We’re just going to have to follow the trend of what the market is doing.”

But costs were up across the board for all growers, he said. “Fertilizer was a lot higher this year, as were all the input costs, from packaging to pallets.”

Green Thumb Farms is “trying to be responsible” when it comes to setting pricing, Hart said. “Nothing we have is lower than it was last year pricewise,” he said.

But the only way the company can survive is to have a profitable year, and that means making money over its costs.

“Last year’s [price] isn’t going to be able to cover that,” Hart said.

Gad does not expect potato prices to approach the “crazy high numbers” seen during the summer. “We’ve already seen the numbers go way down,” he said.

Fob per-carton prices of Idaho russets, for example, recently dropped from $40-45 to the $20 range, Gad said.

However, he does not expect those prices to reach the $14-15 level, where they were in the past.

Growers most likely will get a decent return this year, “which is healthy for the farm industry, and it’s going to be healthy for the retailers and everybody else along the way,” Gad said. “I think everybody is going to win.”