Today, as the 2025 Potato harvest quickly winds down across North America, prices are alarmingly low for open-market uncommitted Potatoes.
We’re longtime subscribers to ‘North American Potato Market News,’ a weekly four-page briefing from Idaho on all things Potato world. NAPMN lands in our in-box every Thursday evening, like clockwork.
This week’s issue happened to have a side bar box listing the varieties of Certified Seed Potatoes grown in the State of Maine in crop year 2025. Processing varieties predominated and acreage totaled 8928 acres (down 1.5% from LY’s 9060 acres).
However, here’s the troubling part. The Potato market has fallen apart. Last winter, most of the big French Fry processors cut back contracted acreage by around 15% in most regions, including Maine. Some producers responded this spring by cutting back their acreage. Others held tight hoping with a roll of the dice that this winter’s open market would need those extra spuds. Potato Process growers are protected by contracted prices. Most Table and Seed growers are uncontracted and whip-lashed by the open market.
There is a big Potato crop. Good to excellent growing conditions in 2025 abounded across most North American Potato-growing areas. Even in the East where stubborn drought hit hard – like here in Maine – there was regional variation. In Maine and New Brunswick, the closer one farmed to the Gulf of St Lawrence, the more normal the rainfall and the better the subsequent Potato yields.
PEI got walloped by drought and Potato yields were off 25-30%. Since September, Maine, New Brunswick and the Prairie Provinces has been shipping boatloads of process stock into PEI so that French Fry plants can run at full capacity until next Fall’s harvest.
Here’s the bad news in numbers. NAPMN reports the “Idaho Russet Grower Return Index,” a key indicator in the Potato world, dropped to $2.39 per cwt (hundredweight). “That is $4.80 per cwt, or 66.8%, below the year-earlier GRI. It is about one-third of the field-run break even price, according to our annual cost of production estimates.”
Potato prices have been hurting for three years running. The Potato market has been struggling to regain stability ever since the epic topsy-turvy Covid disruption.
We’re thankful to be independent of the cruel commodity market system. We’re farmer-marketers who for 35+ years have built up our mail-order business of selling Certified Seed Potatoes direct to end-user home and market gardeners. We retail 95% of our crop of Organic Maine Certified Seed Potatoes. Before we plant in the spring, we know where every harvested potato will have a home.
In the photo on a gray October Potato harvest day in 2009, when the rain started in 11-year-old Sarah gave 6-year-old yellow-rubber-booted Amy a piggyback ride out of the field.
Potato farmers could use more big sisters like Sarah to hold a colored umbrella over their heads in tough years like this one.
Caleb, Peter, Megan & Jim