Potato Growers Hurt

 Southern Idaho Potato Cooperative, SIPCO acts as the bargaining unit for Idaho potato growers selling to big frozen food companies. Their Executive Director, Dan Hargraves says that growers were promised something that they didn’t get.

“SIPCO negotiates annual contracts with the 4 companies in Idaho that produce frozen French fries for McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Burger King, etc. Last September we came to an agreement for the ’09 crop and we had a competitive set of contracts among all companies for the ’09 crop which is a crop that we’ll be planting here in a month or two and growing this summer. The recession hit and ConAgra strung us along and said it’s gonna be a few more weeks and nothing happened and low and behold not even a week ago they contacted me and said we’re just going to go to the field with our own price. My question was so you’re just gonna turn your back on the agreement that you have with SIPCO. We went out, we put down phosphate, we put down potash, soil fumigant, invested anywhere from $500-800 an acre in this ground to grow potatoes for them and now find ourselves holding the bag.”