At this year’s Potato Association of America annual meeting in Portland, a big event in the potato industry quietly took place just down the street from the annual meeting: a group of storage experts from across the potato industry met to officially form the North American Potato Storage Association (NAPSO).
Our official mission is to revolutionize how potatoes are stored across the continent, enhancing the sustainability and profitability of the industry. By coming together as a unified group, we can better pool expertise and knowledge, share best practices and drive innovation in storage technologies and techniques. If I’m really honest, the need for a storage-specific organization is — maybe above anything else — to draw the attention that storage season deserves.
In-season potato management has jumped leaps and bounds in the last 30 years. Just think: the industry has gained sensors, drones and satellite imagery; new genetics thanks to advanced breeding techniques like Crispr-Cas9; big steps forward in IPM and irrigation efficiency; farm management software, big data, analytics and so much more. All of that has had an important impact on the yield and quality coming out of the field.
Meanwhile… storage season management has pretty much been status quo for decades. Case in point: the industry’s go-to storage product hasn’t changed in 60 years. What are we as an industry missing out on by not investing effort into thinking storage? Perhaps even more critically, are we as an industry ready to respond to the marketplace’s changing expectations, which will surely include storage season in the near future too?
Our goal is that NAPSO serves as a hub for storage-specific knowledge exchange, helping members stay on the leading edge of industry trends and advancements and acting as a practical resource connecting people to tools, information and experts.
As part of our efforts, NAPSO is organizing a new, storage-specific conference. We’ll be launching the conference next year as an addition to the annual Potato Association of America conference. Our goal is to grow the event into a standalone conference in the near future, providing a dedicated platform for in-depth discussions on storage practices, technologies, and challenges. Stay tuned for more details.
Keen to get involved? Check NAPSO out at https://napso.info. Fill out our online form to get email notifications about how our organization is progressing. We’d love to have you join us!