PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — After a banner year last year, officials with the Maine Potato Board said Wednesday that this year’s crop looks healthy and disease free, but they will not be sure if it will be comparable to last year’s until harvesting starts in the coming weeks.
This year’s crop “looks quite good,” said Don Flannery, executive director of the Maine Potato Board.
“I don’t know if we are going to see the same record yield that we saw last year,” he said. “We won’t know that until we have all of the crops out of the ground. But we have pretty much been disease-free as far as late blight, so that is a very good sign.”
Potato growers harvested 315 hundredweights of potatoes last year, according to Flannery. Maine farmers average about 290 hundredweights per acre.
The amount of Maine land devoted to potatoes, however, is down by about 3 percent this year to an estimated 48,500 acres, according to board officials. That represents a loss of about 10,000 acres over the last decade, as farmers diversify their crops or age out of the business.
Flannery said some growers already have started to harvest their crops in central Maine, and he anticipated that all farmers would be harvesting by Sept. 19.
He said he anticipates that there will be about the same amount of hand pickers as last year, but he could not put a number on the amount.
“There are so few of them it is hard to judge,” he said. “There are a small amount in the Fort Kent and Presque Isle area.”
Flannery said that growers are anxious to get going.
“The only thing that we really can’t control is the weather,” he said Wednesday. “We just hope that we don’t get a lot of rain.”