Hansen Farms in Rupert, ID, launched its annual potato harvest September 14.
The company grows seven potato varieties across approximately 60 fields, including Burbanks, Norkotahs, Clearwaters, Rangers, Reveille, Kings, and Dakotas. Storage facilities on the farm have been readied for the incoming yield, with each storage shed holding up to 10 million pounds of potatoes.
Brian Hansen, fourth-generation farm operations manager at Hansen Farms, says the preparation process runs up to ten months ahead of the first day in the fields. “We actually start preparing for harvest in the wintertime,” Hansen says. “Last December we started going through machinery, planning on any kind of changes that we were going to make from an operation standpoint and how we set up our machinery. That carries all the way through spring and summer, and you can see behind [us] we’ve got equipment starting to get set up. We test run things, we look for just problems that we can fix to help deliver the best quality potato that we can.”
Beyond machinery, the heat Idaho has experienced this summer has added pressure on the operation. Hansen says elevated temperatures over recent years have accelerated crop aging and made moisture management more difficult. “The hot conditions have impacted our crop over the last three to five years, I would say. It makes it age more quickly; it’s harder to keep the moisture that we need in the fields. That heat has definitely played a role in potato quality for this year.”
The dry summer also raises concerns about the following season. Hansen says water conservation is a topic now entering conversations in a way it has not before. “I think this is the first year where we’re actually hearing and seeing people talk about conserving more water and cutting that water back. Hoping that we have a good winter because next year I think is when we’re really going to see an impact on water availability.”