Idaho's potato harvest is turning up good-quality tubers but lower yields after a season of frost, heat, wind and wildfire smoke, Capital Press reports. "Quality is consistent all over, from what I hear," said Travis Blacker, vice president of research and industry relations at the Idaho Potato Commission. "Yields are down. We're not yet sure by how much."
Blacker set this year against the largely "picture-perfect" conditions of 2025. In the lower-elevation southwest, digging began around the third week of August. In the eastern and south-central areas many fields were still to be lifted, and he expected the push to run until the first week of October.
At American Falls in the east, Kamren Koompin, who grows potatoes for fried products, said yields of his red and Umatilla varieties were down from the high-yield 2025 season and just below the long-term average. He hears that Russet Burbank yields are down substantially from a year ago. Quality is good, but below-average specific gravity, a measure of density, is cutting yields.
Koompin traced part of the loss to the calendar: a warm March led many growers to plant early, then cold snaps arrived in late April and late May, followed by frost in June. Summer nights were also warmer than a year earlier, which drags down specific gravity in varieties that need a wide gap between day and night temperatures.
Near Hammett in the southwest, farmer Nick Blanksma reported average quality and below-average yields. It was not the daytime highs that hurt, he said, but nights that did not cool enough, and wildfire smoke "did an awful lot of damage". September weather has favoured digging and his harvest is on schedule.
The commission puts this year's planted area at 298,915 acres from field-level counts, about 13,000 fewer than last year. USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service recorded yields of 440 hundredweight an acre in 2025 and 430 in 2024. Ryan Wahlen, sales manager at the Aberdeen fresh-potato grower-shipper Pleasant Valley Potato, said on 10 September that yields looked "as bad as we've had in years", likely 50 to 60 sacks an acre below last year and with smaller sizes.
Photo: Kirsten Strough, USDA / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
Source: Capital Press
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