Growing up on his father’s potato farm in Cyr Plantation, Dominic LaJoie said he never could have imagined the size his family’s company, LaJoie Growers LLC, would reach.
He also never planned on getting into politics. Nonetheless, the National Potato Council elected LaJoie, a fourth-generation St. John Valley potato farmer in Maine, as president of the Washington, D.C.-based interest group on Feb. 22, writes Hannah Catlin in a news story for Bangor Daily News.
LaJoie will serve a one-year term, during which he will lead the council through its transition to working with President Joe Biden’s administration, help coordinate its ongoing response to the pandemic-altered potato industry and generally pursue the industry’s priorities on a national level.
He will also host the annual National Potato Council’s summer meeting in Presque Isle in July, if COVID-19 safety protocols allow it. If the meeting takes place, it will be the first held in Aroostook County in the council’s history.
LaJoie said that the industry will likely be “forever changed” by the pandemic as the selling market moved away from restaurants and toward the retail industry.
Source: Bangor Daily News (BDN). Full story here
Photo: Dominic LaJoie shows off 1,000 pounds of LaJoie potatoes at LaJoie Growers’ headquarters in Van Buren on Feb. 26. Credit: Hannah Catlin / BDN
