Potato growers working together for survival

BOISE – Hundreds of Idaho growers, who provide about one of every five potatoes Americans eat in restaurants or buy in stores, are banding together in an unprecedented show of cooperation to prop up prices.

The cooperation is necessary, they say, to reverse a depressed market before it pushes even more of them off the land.

“We’ve lost half the potato farms in Idaho in the last decade,” said David Beesley, who grows about 400 acres of potatoes in eastern Idaho’s Upper Snake River Valley.

“With last year’s pricing the way it’s shaking things up, we could probably lose another third,” Beesley said. “The industry is right on its knees.”

Over 400 growers, who sold over 2 billion pounds of Idaho potatoes to the fresh market last year, have formed a new cooperative whose members have agreed to sell for nothing less than the weekly price set by the group’s own economists and statisticians.

It’s not the first time growers have looked for ways to boost a market that has covered their production costs – about $5 per hundred pounds – only three times in the last 15 years.

Consumer demand for potatoes hasn’t fluctuated more than 2 percentage points in any year for the past two decades, despite aggressive marketing campaigns. Production costs have steadily risen and could jump as much as a third in the coming year because of increased fuel prices.

Formed a week ago, the United Fresh Potato Growers of Idaho will issue its second price directive today. The first sent out a week ago – calling for members to hold out for prices modestly higher than they were running – has had an effect.

Beesley said the price for those smaller brown potatoes sold in plastic bags in markets is up to 62 1/2 cents per 10 pounds from 60 cents a week earlier. The target price was 65 cents. The impact will be limited, if felt at all, on consumers since those same potatoes are already selling in retail markets for $2 to $3 per 10 pounds.

“What was always missing in our industry was communication and cooperation,” said Frank Muir, director of the Idaho Potato Commission. “Sometimes they can be their own worst enemies. But in the past year, they have seen maybe a more long-term view of the industry and not just short term panic.

“And as you look long term, you see you have to make some short-term corrections to achieve what you want long-term,” Muir said.

While the commission is not involved in market pricing, he called the relative unity among growers a major development, one that could make this attempt to control prices more successful than all those of the past.

It could be critical to potato growers across the nation.

“All the other states base pricing on Idaho,” Beesley said.

“It’s the benchmark, and as we become weaker and weaker in our marketing strategies, the return to all the other states falls. It’s wiping out a whole industry.”

Grower representatives from Wisconsin, Colorado, Nebraska, Washington, Oregon and California met with organizers of the new Idaho cooperative about adopting their approach, and Idaho growers expressed some optimism that eventually a multistate federation of growers controlling an even greater share of production could dictate prices.