Penfold Farms

What a crazy year it has been in agriculture in general, but if you have been following what's going on in Idaho potatoes the situation has certainly been a head scratcher. An awful lot of potato inventory was donated to food banks by Eastern Idaho potato farmers so as not to have to just dump them. But there're so many complexities to growing, harvesting and selling spuds, I don't know how these guys do it. A great example of all of the ups, downs, ins and outs are expressed by Nathan Penfold of Penfold Farms in Driggs, Idaho.

At the beginning of the season, I could sell, we would have had a nice crop that I knew was going to make it, if we didn't have the frost, I could have sold a bunch of potatoes and stuff. We tried to have them all contracted and so is what we did. As those uncontracted guys that were looking for potatoes, I actually we turned them down because I didn't know how they were going to sort out. And so we really we cut back a lot on that because we knew we were going to be short. And so I was saving potatoes for the guys that always get spuds for me. And so we were just making sure that we could get them covered. And it looked like we were going to need every single one of them to make sure that we covered all our contracts we had.

And then it goes from that crash to you got a whole bunch of more spuds that you got to try to get rid of and people backing out of contracts. Yep. What a year. But that's a farmer's life.