Twelve million pounds of Manitoba processing spuds are on route to hunger-mitigation agencies across North America. It could be just the start.
There’s nothing better than a full storage bin full of great quality potatoes… except when those potatoes just aren’t sellable. Last fall’s record harvest of processing spuds means many growers are currently storing more potatoes than processors can manage.
As winter turns towards spring and growers need space to store seed for the upcoming season, some are grappling with what to do with crop that needs to move. For farmers who have invested months of time, effort and cost into a growing season, then months of time, effort and cost into carefully storing those spuds, the options aren’t great: dehydrating for starch or potato flakes, sending to livestock feed, or — the least desirable — composting.
Aside from the financial hit, sending perfectly market-ready potatoes to a non-food end-use is upsetting, especially knowing that there are people in our own communities and around the world who aren’t able to place adequate food on their own and their children’s plates.
So what about food banks? In Canada, demand for food banks has risen to the highest level ever. In Canada, demand in 2023 was up 78.5 per cent over pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Seventeen per cent of food bank clients are employed but not able to make ends meet without support. Canadian foodbanks see more than two million visits each month. 642,257 of the mouths fed in a month are children. On top of rising demand, food banks are struggling with increasing costs and decreasing donations.
It seems like an obvious match: some farmers have extra food; food banks are in critical need of donations. But, as any farmer who has tried to donate farm products at scale knows, the issue is in the details.
“There are some bottlenecks. [Larger food security charities] will take control of the potatoes and then distribute to the smaller food banks, but it is a matter of: how do you get the potatoes there? Who’s paying for transport? Who’s packaging the potatoes? Unfortunately, that complexity often makes growers back off. They think it’s too complex; it’s too expensive,” says Victoria Stamper, general manager of the United Potato Growers of Canada.
Already last fall, Canada’s potato producer organizations were starting to talk about possible solutions for surplus 2023 potatoes.
“There were some processors that had said they just didn’t need that many potatoes, that we were either going to have to destroy the potatoes or dispose of them. As we were talking about methods of disposal, one of the comments was, ‘It’s not as easy as you think’. You can’t necessarily just dump all your potatoes into cattle feed,” says Stamper.
At an October board meeting, Keystone Potato Producers Association’s (KPPA) new general manager, Susan Ainsworth, brought up the possibility of connecting with an organization called the Farmlink Project.
Farmlink is a Los Angeles-based organization that works across North America to connect farms that have surplus food with hunger-fighting charities across Canada and the United States. Established at the start of the pandemic by a group of college students, Farmlinks’ goals are to feed people in need, reduce carbon emissions, and empower the next generation of changemakers. It achieves that by acting as communications, logistics and support between growers, cash/service donors and charity food providers. When a grower has a surplus they are willing to donate, Farmlink sources the packaging, coordinates shipping and connects donations to specific locations.
“Farmlink is the hunger-fighting charity that recognizes logistics is the biggest problem to defeating hunger,” says Mike Meyer, head of farmer advocacy for the Farmlink Project.
“That resonated,” says Stamper, who reached out to Meyer over email, then had a chance to meet him face to face at the Potato Expo in Austin, Texas in mid-January.
“In their chats, Meyer clarified that, no, the potatoes didn’t need to be packaged or even washed: Farmlink could distribute totes of lightly sorted, unwashed bulk. As importantly, Farmlink could coordinate shipping costs and logistics, leaving just the loading to the farmer.
“That’s when we really started to get some traction, discussing, ‘okay — how do we really make this work? How can we connect the right people to make that happen?’” says Stamper.
The United Potato Growers of Canada reached out to its provincial partner organizations, who in turn reached out to their growers. One such grower organization was the KPPA, which put out a call to its farmers in mid-February. Almost immediately, Isaiah Hofer, farm manager at Acadia Hutterite Colony in Carberry, Manitoba, replied, offering up a whopping six million pounds of table-ready processing spuds.
“Within a month, the whole thing was moving,” says Stamper. “Farmlink stepping up and offering to take away the complexity of making the donation has been a game changer.”
“Our reaction [to Acadia’s donation] was, ‘Thank you!’” says Meyer. “Canada’s food insecurity rate is 18 per cent. In Manitoba, it’s 14 per cent. In Alberta, it’s 22 per cent. The simple fact of the matter is that we can’t defeat hunger without food. So, we started talking taters.”
A whole lot of taters, in fact: 150 semi-loads from the one colony.
Within two weeks and thanks to a generous donation of totes from Simplot, trucks were rolling, with Acadia Hutterite Colony’s spuds heading directly from the farm to charities across Ontario and Manitoba, but also into California, Texas and beyond. About the same time, Acadia Hutterite Colony’s neighbour, Blumengart Hutterite Colony, stepped up with another six million pound donation.
Farmlink deals in virtually any product they can pass on to individuals and families in need, from carrots to kitty litter. However, Meyer says, potatoes top the preferred product list.
“The apple is the gold standard [for produce donation]. The next gold standards are the potato, the orange and the sweet potato. [Potatoes are] incredibly nutritious produce items. They’re incredibly durable, they don’t need a lot of special handling, they have a tremendous shelf life and they’re so versatile. Besides the apple, the potato is top to bottom perfect.”
While 12 million pounds sounds — and is — a huge volume of donated spuds, Meyer says he’d welcome more with open arms. In fact, he says that in an ideal world, he’d love to send a tote of potatoes to each of Canada’s 4,000 hunger fighting charities each and every single day.
“We need 700 million pounds, so 70 truckloads a day every day, to drive food insecurity in Canada to zero,” says Meyer.
Donating excess spuds to fight hunger isn’t only a win for people in need. Compared to composting excess spuds, a donation to charity makes an important environmental impact too. According to Farmlink, rescuing 10 million pounds of potatoes — and remember the donations from the two colonies was 12 million pounds — prevents the release of 48 million pounds of carbon equivalent or greenhouse gas emissions. That’s the equivalent to the emissions produced by 4,653 cars driven for one year or in farming terms, the amount sequestered from 27,512 cover cropped acres per year.
Though Farmlink’s focus is food security, Meyer says supporting farmers’ financial health is critical too. Step one in that is ensuring farmers receive a tax receipt for their donation.
“Certainly, the farmer, and certainly anyone who would donate packaging, we’d send a donation tax receipt. We keep track of where everything goes, and we make sure everything only goes to a hunger-fighting charity and is used within the rules to make sure it is eligible for a tax donation.”
Meyer would like to see Farmlink’s support of farmers go beyond the obvious, though.
“We recognize that [farmers who donate] are dealing with a significant financial hit when we’re working at this scale. One of the things I’m hoping to do with the United Potato Growers of Canada — and we’ve done this with the United States Department of Agriculture and the state departments of agriculture — is ask: how can we help advocate to the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture so that there may be something that can be put in place to help farmers?”
Stamper hopes that the potato industry’s leadership in this kind of major donation becomes a model that other commodity groups follow. Certainly, no one hopes for excess spuds at any scale, let alone the scale facing some producers this year. However, the reality is that market imbalances do occur from time to time in all commodities, and potatoes happen to be well-positioned this year to lead Canada’s fruit and veggie sector towards hunger-fighting, best-use donations.
“We’re just getting started. It’s so exciting to be in on the ground floor,” say Stamper.
