After the potato harvest comes another cycle of work for the Maine Potato Board, looking ahead to changes, challenges and opportunities.
The board has named its Young Farmer of 2017: Jay LaJoie of Van Buren, whose family farm grows blue potatoes for Terra Chips, along with grains and other root vegetables. The LaJoies have been at the forefront in incorporating precision agriculture technology such as GPS, and Jay, as the fifth generation, represents the industry’s future, according to Potato Board.
The LaJoies were among the farms that hosted a visiting contingent from Potatoes USA, formerly known as the U.S. Potato Board. In mid-October, Blair Richardson, president and CEO of Potatoes USA, visited Maine with the group’s chairman Mike Pink, a processing potato grower from Washington State.
The two met with multiple farms and also went hunting — an annual post-harvest tradition for many Maine potato farmers. They came up short on partridge, but offered Richardson, a Texas native, his first hunt in woodlands and a taste of northern Maine culture. “In Texas, we call that walking: we just happen to be carrying guns with us,” Richardson joked. “I’ve never actually hunted where you have to look at trees around you.”
Richardson and Pink were in Maine to learn more about the state’s potato economy and the Maine Potato Board’s unique role as a quasi-governmental industry organization, working in conjunction with the state government on a range of issues.
Potatoes USA is broadly focused on growing local, national and global markets for fresh and processed potatoes, and on that front, the organization recently launched a new food truck program, operating food trucks in Denver and Washington D.C. selling all potato-based fresh-made meals.
“Ideally, we’d love to have a couple hundred trucks in every major market across the country,” Richardson said. Potatoes USA along with state potato organizations have also launched a Potatoes Raise the Bar initiative to supply vegetable and salad bars to schools.
Richardson said Potatoes USA is also trying to help secure large national research grants for issues like the dickeya bacterial disease that’s showing up as a new problem for North American seed potato growers — especially Maine’s seed potato growers, who’ve kept a strong business selling seed potatoes to farmers in on the East Coast despite Aroostook County’s decline in potato acreage and family farms.
This year, Maine saw both fewer acres and fewer farming operations of seed potatoes, said Eric Hitchcock, manager of the seed certification program with the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.
The agency certified 9,917 acres of seed potatoes, down by a little more than 3 percent from last year, while the number of certified seed potato growers dropped from 117 to 106, Hitchcock said.
That acreage decline continues a three-year trend and comes amid the recent emergence of dickeya, a bacteria that can cause the rotting disease blackleg. Dickeya presents such a threat to Maine seed potato growers and their brand of disease-free seed stock that the Maine Potato Board worked with the DACF to institute new tests and quality assurance protocols aimed at spotting dickeya and blackleg in seed potatoes before they’re sent to customers in states like Maryland and Pennsylvania.
This year, Hitchcock said, 14 seed potato lots failed certification due to the detection in field surveys of blackleg symptoms, one of the new components of the certification changes. Fourteen lots out of hundreds is “a fairly low number in the scheme of things,” Hitchcock said.
Among the other changes, the certification program is transitioning to all laboratory tests and will over the coming years discontinue the traditional “Florida grow out” where samples of Maine seed potatoes are grown in Florida during the winter to take field surveys of various diseases in a warmer climate. Last year’s Florida grow out was cancelled due to the torrential rainfall on newly-planted seed potatoes, highlighting the limitations of the practice.
Separate from the DACF seed certification program, the Maine Potato Board’s renovated lab is well up and running, offering voluntary dickeya testing for seed growers on dormant potatoes. It’s one of the first laboratories in North America to do reliable testing for the dickeya bacteria, which until a few years ago was only a problem for European potato growers, said Tim Hobbs, the board’s director of grower relations.
This past summer, the lab tested 843 samples on potatoes from plants thought to be infected with dickeya — 20 percent of which were positive with the bacteria. The lab has also been doing dickeya tests on dormant, recently-harvested seed potatoes this fall.
In other news, the Maine Potato Board continues to see declining sales of its baked potatoes at the annual Eastern States Exposition fair in Springfield, Massachusetts. The sales are down by about $4,000 since last year and are at the lowest since 1997, according to Don Flannery, the Potato Board’s executive director.
In recent years the board has seen a number of reliable, long-time fair employees — who are mostly hired from southern New England — retire after working in the temporary summer job for years or decades. “Some of these people had been with us 25-30 years, and they started when they were 50,” Flannery said.
It’s one more sign of the country’s aging demographics and its impacts on the workforce. At home in Aroostook County, the Potato Board has also had trouble finding enough seasonal workers for other operations such as the bruise survey program, which pays people about $14 an hour to travel to farms around the region and take samples with growers.
In other employment news, longtime entomologist and potato pest scientist Jim Dwyer is beginning a three-year phased retirement where he’ll be working two days a week through November of 2019. Dwyer has spent 35 years working with the Maine Cooperative Extension in Presque Isle and has been a key part of the Extension’s integrated pest management and pest alert program, working with growers to track and control pests like the Colorado Potato Beetle and aphids.
While Dwyer’s expertise will be missed, Flannery said, the Board is looking to forward to a young agricultural scientist filling another key position. Starting in January, Andrew Plant, a UMaine associate extension professor in Presque Isle, will take over the role of manager for the Potato Board’s disease testing lab.
