Potato yields off.

[bucket]

There is an article in the WP about potato yields being off 6 percent...I guess instead of feeding the potatoes to cows this past spring they should have focused on how to keep them in some sort of food quality for later...maybe french fries and frozen ....or dehydrated ...etc etc etc...

Its hard to feel for the industry when they do stupid shit like feed human food to livestock and a short time later have concerns about lower yields....

Potato prices will go up at the Weston group of stores....for a decade....or until he makes a billion on price fixing....

[bucket]

Or maybe some of the current 100000 acres of cadillac irrigation in Saskatchewan will be growing more potatoes so they can fund the new irrigation themselves. Will put money on the saskparty offers a grant to grow potatoes here for machinery and operating costs.

[WiltonRanch]

Or maybe some of the current 100000 acres of cadillac irrigation in Saskatchewan will be growing more potatoes so they can fund the new irrigation themselves. Will put money on the saskparty offers a grant to grow potatoes here for machinery and operating costs.

As long as they don’t leave the door open and freeze the bloody things.

[farmaholic]

My Dad said it was his worst crop ever, never seen it that bad. And he tends his patch with hoe and water.

LOL

[helmsdale]

Poor in the garden here... spuds very small and not alot of them. A pile of top growth for what we got.

[seldomseen]

Not the kind of answer Bucket is looking for but we had one of the best potato crop ever. Storage bin over flowing plus gave lots away to family and friends. Dirt was driest in years and potatoes are a real nice size and shape and the cleanest I can remember!

[burnt]

S.W. Ontario - it was a good potato year. 12 rows about 65 feet long, 3' apart. We dug about 600 lbs, mostly really nice taters. Some yuge ones, but those plants had maybe only 3 like that plus a few small ones.

Where some poor seed potatoes didn't come up well the plants on either side of the empty spaces did almost double production over where they all came up.

She weighed the potatoes off of one plant (not the one pictures) that had little competition and it put up 8lbs by itself.



The pic doesn't give a true proportionate view of size.

[seldomseen]

S.W. Ontario - it was a good potato year. 12 rows about 65 feet long, 3' apart. We dug about 600 lbs, mostly really nice taters. Some yuge ones, but those plants had maybe only 3 like that plus a few small ones.

Where some poor seed potatoes didn't come up well the plants on either side of the empty spaces did almost double production over where they all came up.

She weighed the potatoes off of one plant (not the one pictures) that had little competition and it put up 8lbs by itself.

[ATTACH]6849[/ATTACH]

The pic doesn't give a true proportionate view of size.

Wow So how many hills would that be?
We plant about 200 hills every spring.

[burnt]

Wow So how many hills would that be?
We plant about 200 hills every spring.

We don't really do 'hills", so not sure how our rows would compare. Plant them in a row, maybe about 15" between plants, and hill them all up in those rows.

We got a 50# bag of seed potatoes of one white variety and a 10# of reds, besides some other that we kept from old potatoes. A few Yukon Gold also.

For some reason, a bunch of the white variety didn't come up, leaving gaps in those rows.

What was really interesting when we dug them this fall was to see the big difference in yield from the plants beside the gaps - far out-yielded the ones where they all came up. Experimenting with the spacing something to try next year? It was a fairly dry summer here.

#NeverDoneLearning

[sumdumguy]

Gynormous potatoes planted on top of alfalfa pellets in deep hills.

[burnt]

Gynormous potatoes planted on top of alfalfa pellets in deep hills.

Deep hills of soil, or alfalfa pellets?

Might try another lazy technique she read of - lay down a heavy layer of hay this fall, put the seed potatoes into it next spring and cover them up with it, scratch the hay back next fall, pick up the taters.

[sumdumguy]

Each hill has a handful of alfalfa pellets in bottom, and have tried covering deep hills with mulch instead of soil. If you have lots of water and like robbing potatoes during growing season, its excellent. Hay would likely work too if there were few seeds but chopped straw would be ideal prolly. Next year👍

[burnt]

Bucket had it right - potato yields are down across Canada this year, due to hot, dry weather in key growing regions, as well as later planting dates.

Farmtario newspaper reports that this year's harvest hit 100 million cwt, down from 106.4 million cwt in 2019.

This lower number comes from higher acres as well, showing a dip in lower yields overall.

The potato market changed with the advent of the Wuhan Flu, shrinking the french fires market - nobody singing 'take me out to the ballgame' this summer - , while the cooking potato and chip market grew.

Consumers can't get too many potato chips, it seems...

[Leduc cowboy]

seed Growers around here are showing no signs they are hurting here .