06/23/05 Potato growers see big acreage reduction

Potato growers from across the US met in Prince Edward Island last week to try to convince Canadian growers to cut back on their crop. PEI is the largest potato growing province in Canada with over 100 thousand acres but its growers will cap the acreage, cutting back by 96 hundred acres. That means an overall 24 thousand acre reduction in Canadian potatoes. Add that to US fresh potato acreage cuts of 35 thousand acres and it's apparent to Keith Esplin of the Potato Growers of Idaho that the reduction plan is working. ESPLIN "Growers recognized that they have to do something different. You can't keep losing money eight out of ten years so. This isn't the whole puzzle but it's certainly an important piece of it." If you take last year's yields of 401 hundredweight per acre the effort by the United Fresh Potato Growers has removed 15.6 million hundredweight or roughly eleven percent of the fresh potatoes from the 2005 crop. ESPLIN "We had about a seven week run of increasing prices here until last week when it kind of stalled we think just temporarily. Returns to the growers have actually about doubled over the last couple of month. Now they're still now good, they're still below the cost of production. If United had done nothing they would have gone worse than they were because of the surplus." Today's Idaho Ag News Bill Scott