The Potatoes Future Part 2

The Potatoes Future Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.
A lot of time was spent recently at the Potato Expo talking about what the future would hold for agriculture and the potato in general. Bill Whitacre, President of Simplot says while we have come a long way in some areas, in others we seem to be floundering.

WHITACRE: In 1974 Henry Kissinger at the World Food Conference in Rome made a comment - within a decade no one will go to bed hungry. 35 years later there’s one billion people that go to bed hungry, that go to bed malnourished. It is getting the appropriate attention. We’ve had comments recently from Bill Gates that said its agriculture’s time.

Gates also said it was time to utilize all our resources available and Whitacre says the industry need to approach it responsibly.

WHITACRE: But we have to do it with sustainability. We have to do it with responsibility. We have to understand well beyond the green revolution. We have to understand what our roles are and understand what our disciplines are but first of all let’s talk about the potato. It is the world’s largest non-grain food. It’s critical to feeding the world but it has to be sustainable, nutritious and healthy.

Interestingly Whitacre says that the potato industry like all of agriculture will need to be in some level of defensive mode. Things like the Adkins diet that nearly single handedly destroyed the potato industry.

WHITACRE: But it’s really about how we enhance the relevancy of the potato in the future and with systems, full systems of everything from the initial genetics of the potato all the way to the food safety and the consumption of the potato with various innovations and how we serve the potato. It is adaptable all over the world. It has incredible nutritional value that gets lost frequently.

Whitacre says it’s important for the potato industry to tell its whole nutritional story. But he maintains there will still be some challenges in the future.

WHITACRE: It comes from agronomic challenges, it comes from new ways of cooking foods, it comes from the sustainability issues we are faced with and it’s going to take agronomic and genetic developments that are far beyond what we have imagined in the past. And these future challenges really have an opportunity to bring us out of defensive positions and make no mistake, this isn’t just about the potato, it’s about much of production agriculture.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.