Record potato crops in Canada and the U.S. could see fewer spuds planted for 2024.
After a few not so good production years and increased demand from the processing industry, a higher planted potato acreage in North America has led to record production numbers. And while this means there are plenty of spuds to go around, it could impact how many potatoes are planted this year.
“We didn’t have huge bumper yields. We just had way too many planted acres,” Dale Lathim, executive director of the Potato Growers of Washington, Inc., says in a phone interview.
“The fear was that that might be the new normal and so everybody adjusted their expectations for production off of each acre to be more in line with ‘21 to ’22. And what we got was back to normal yields.”
Statistics Canada reported that there were 128,115,000 hundredweight (cwt) of potatoes produced in Canada in 2023 — marking the largest crop on record. The average yield was 332.4 cwt per harvested acres. There were 385,368 acres of spuds harvested, down from the initial 395,389 acres planted at the start of the growing season.
However, that record production isn’t from coast-to-coast. While potato growers in the West harvested a record crop, their comrades in the East weren’t as lucky.
“A lot of the Atlantic northeast the crops aren’t what we thought. There are potential
storage issues, there was hollow heart in the russets, it’s that type of thing. As much as overall in Canada we’ve had a record crop, a lot of that record was in the West in the processing sector,” Victoria Stamper, general manager of the United Potato Growers of Canada, explains in a phone interview.
South of the border, the United States Department of Agriculture reported the 2023 U.S. potato crop at 434.2 million cwt. An increase in harvested areas and the third largest yield on record at 452 cwt per acre allowed for largest crop on record since 2000 to be produced.
Stamper cautions that while there is a surplus of spuds south of the border, the impact on pricing in Canada hasn’t yet been as significant as in the U.S. but has reduced Canadian potato exports. Due to the record processing crop in Western Canada, movement of potatoes from the U.S. to Canada may be reduced in this sector. However, there does remain concern of processing potatoes moving into the fresh sector in the Pacific Northwest.
An export market option — at least for processed frozen product — could be Europe, which suffered from an overabundance of rainfall during harvest. The North-Western European Potato Growers reported in November 2023 that production was estimated at 23.6 million tonnes, however as of that date only 22.2 million tonnes had been harvested.
“There may be opportunities for Canada to export frozen product,” Stamper says. “Maybe we’ll see fewer imports from some of the European countries for frozen fries coming into North America.”
Processing contract negotiations are heating up for the 2024 growing season. Lathim says the potato growers in the Columbia Basin finalized their contract the first week of January — the region historically sets the potato price for across North America. The contract prices for 2024 should be stable with a change of maybe a per cent or two, but Lathim says there won’t be any dramatic jumps in prices.
The record production is going to cause issues though for the 2024 crop. Lathim doesn’t believe all the spuds that were grown in 2023 will be used, with some still available well into harvest 2024 and others being destroyed or sent for animal feed.
“We’re going to have some carryover into ‘24. So, the planted acres should go down,” he explains. “I think you can expect some decline in acres everywhere. But the further east you go, there is going to be less and less.”
The seed situation should be positive heading into spring planting. With the West seeing record crop production, seed potato crops out of Saskatchewan and British Columbia have been reported as good. Stamper cautions that there could be shortages of particular varieties in some regions but there should be enough overall seed to go around for the year.
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