Order french fries at any Chick-fil-A in America, and there’s a good chance they started in this corner of southeast Idaho. The restaurant chain buys most of its frozen fries from Idaho-based Lamb Weston, whose motto is “Possibilities in Potatoes,” as Marc Heller reports for POLITICO.
But a host of challenges — droughts, heat waves, pesticide-resistant insects and surging production from foreign competitors — confronts farmers and companies alike in the heart of U.S. potato production. Potato farmers planted around 15,000 fewer acres in Idaho this year due to drought and low prices, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Growers like Kamren Koompin, whose family has grown potatoes in American Falls for decades, are counting on scientific advances and a helping hand from the federal government to ride out natural disasters amid competition from China and other countries. At the same time, they are worried about the Trump administration’s embrace of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement — which often focuses on ultra-processed food — may turn consumers against potato chips, a key product made from their crops.
Potato chips occupy a middle ground in the MAHA debate that the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t firmly defined. The movement, inspired by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., takes a dim view of the seed oils like canola or sunflower typically used to make them, as well as the dehydrated potatoes used in some products. The resulting nutrition guidelines from the Trump administration, released in January, urge a move away from “chips” without being more specific.
In some ways, potatoes in Idaho are a victim of their own success; the region is so productive that there’s been a glut of potatoes, helping to depress prices at the same time growers face higher costs for everything from fertilizer to electricity to run the irrigation pumps to equipment.
“Over the last six years, we’ve seen feast and famine,” Koompin said on a truck ride around the farm, adding that record high and record low prices have each occurred during that time. Farmers were so productive last year, Koompin said, “you couldn’t give a potato away. A lot went to cattle feed.”
The prices farmers receive for potatoes — largely through annual contracts with big suppliers like Lamb Weston or McCain Foods — doesn’t always match up with what consumers pay. While farmers have seen low prices for potatoes, prices for frozen potato products like fries have shot up in the last decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Farmers who sell fresh potatoes on the open market, where they don’t have annual contracts to protect them, have been hurting, said Patrick Hatzenbuehler, an agricultural economist with the University of Idaho. Buyers facing higher transportation or labor costs also have an incentive to pay growers less.
Source: POLITICO. Read the full article here
Image: Credit Marc Heller/POLITICO
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