Inconsistent Weather Presents Challenges for Pennsylvania Potato Growers | Field Crop News

The weather hasn’t been kind to some Pennsylvania potato growers this year.

High temperatures and a combination of heavy rain followed by drought caused some crop losses, with one grower saying all of his potatoes essentially cooked in the ground before harvest.

It was all about timing.

While growers and experts in the region have not reported noticeable changes with potatoes specific to dormancy length or premature sprouting — which they said is mostly a factor of controlling the storage environment — they have seen new challenges attributable to changing, less-predictable weather patterns.

“I was out on three different potato farms Tuesday (Nov. 12) and seeing some things not so much related to dormancy but related to some other physiological problems that sometimes happen when we have excessive heat or periods of really wet (weather),” said Robert Leiby, an agronomist with Pennsylvania Co-Operative Potato Growers.

Dormancy is a period after harvest when potato tubers don’t sprout or grow, a natural characteristic influenced by factors including variety and growing conditions. This helps potatoes conserve energy by minimizing metabolic activity. Humidity, temperature and light can all affect the crop in this stage.

Five inches of rain in early August followed by a long dry spell presented particular challenges for growers, Leiby said.

“People who are using dry-land agriculture — in other words, they can’t irrigate — will tend to see quality problems more so than if you can manage the water supply a little bit better.”

A rise in Periderm Disorder Syndrome — sometimes called “potato pink eye” — may be attributable to these conditions.

Typical symptoms are pink, slightly raised areas that are easy to spot on moist, freshly dug tubers around the eyes and the stem end but difficult to notice on dry, unwashed potatoes.

“We’ve been getting a number of calls from growers seeing this, and they’re always thinking, ‘Well, is it a fungus? Is it a bacteria or a virus?’ No, it’s not. It is a physiological thing.”

The specific cause is a bit of a mystery, he said.

“When you take these potatoes to the lab and they try to pull whatever organism might be causing this, they don’t find anything,” Leiby said. “They can’t come up with a single cause that is consistent for causing this problem.”

While the problem could be confused visually with either common or powdery scab — caused by either a bacteria or a fungus-like protozoan, respectively — it’s something different, Leiby said.

Effective storage during dormancy is mostly about climate control, he said.

“If you want to hold potatoes for, let’s say into February or March or April or even May, you need to have a good storage system,” he said. “And by that, I mean you need to be able to regulate air flow. You need to be able to bring outside air in, you need to regulate the temperature, and you need to regulate relative humidity. And you also need a storage that’s completely dark — black dark.”

Some commercial growers have computerized potato storages where conditions can be tracked through a smartphone app, he said.

“And if you see one part of your storage heating up for some reason because potatoes are giving off more heat, you can adjust the airflow in that bin by turning a few dials on your phone.”

Boiled Potatoes

Wayne Miller of Epic Acre Farm in Mertztown, Pennsylvania, said extreme weather patterns have made keeping a tight planting schedule even more crucial.

“This drought is nuts,” said Miller, who has been growing mixed vegetables for market for 23 years. “I’ve never experienced a fall this dry.”

He said his potato crop is a total loss this year, which has never happened to him before.

Miller grows the bulk of his potatoes under black plastic on land leased from another farmer, he said, and logistics this year got in the way of him getting his crop in on time.

It was almost June by the time he planted, he said. Then came two or three downpours, followed by extreme heat.

“They basically boiled in the ground,” Miller said.“Then I ran to Lancaster and bought another hundred pounds of Kennebec, planted them and the same thing happened.”

Planting under black plastic exacerbated the heat problem, he said, because that warms the ground even more. Miller said he hasn’t observed any noticeable changes with storage in the recent years he’s managed to pull off a successful crop, and that his usual three varieties store well, especially the Kennebec.

This year was a lesson learned, he said.

“I guess the obvious thing is that this last year was the hottest on record, so if you plant potatoes three or four weeks later than normal, they boil.”

Right around the corner from Miller, Bert Dirsa has been growing potatoes on his 4-acre homestead for more than 40 years.

For more than a decade, Dirsa and his wife, Sue, have been hosting a Potato Fest for friends and family.

Lehigh, Yukon Gold, Red Norland and a variety of fingerling potatoes get planted in six 125-foot rows, rotated annually — swapped out with corn — from one side of the garden plot to the other.

“It seems like I’m having less trouble with potato bugs, which is a good thing,” said Dirsa, who controls the beetles by picking them off the plants and said he gathered only a couple of handfuls this year. “I just know that they haven’t been as bad in recent years.”

Dirsa, who grows without chemicals, did not note any changes with storage, although he did say he’ll be holding back on the mystery purple fingerling variety he picked up as part of a colorful assortment several years ago at Trader Joe’s.

“We have way too many of them now,” he said, adding that whatever the variety is, it’s just too prolific.

“It got out of hand, because I don’t dig them all out, I guess. And then they come up wild in the rows, and they come up in the corn, and where they’re not supposed to come up, and they’ve been taking off,” Dirsa said.

“Last year, they were terrible. They had all kind of a scab on them. I guess that’s because of dryness.”

One consolation prize, Dirsa said, is that the little purple fingerlings are the only potatoes one of his granddaughters will eat.

He may just have to keep a few of them around.