As the calendar inches toward fall, hundreds of Maine farms are preparing for the grueling weekslong marathon that is the potato harvest.
They’ll work sunup to sundown, for six or seven days a week, to extract some 1.7 billion pounds of potatoes from the dirt.
Behind them is a year’s worth of work, beginning at the end of last year’s harvest, to create the best conditions for a bountiful fall. And behind all that work is the Maine Potato Board.
Headquartered in Presque Isle, the board is a state-chartered head of the potato industry. It’s both the marketing arm that champions Maine’s No. 1 food crop and a leading researcher for its advancement.
The “we’re farmers and we grow it” commercials that dominated Maine airwaves in the early 2010s are the work of the Potato Board. So are the designs of many modern irrigation and storage systems found at farms throughout the state. The board administers low-interest loans for growers and studies the diseases affecting crops. It also grows its own seed potatoes — potatoes that are grown to be replanted.
“There’s a reason that the potato is America’s favorite vegetable, and it’s because they’re so versatile,” said Jeannie Tapley, the board’s executive director. So too, in that respect, is the Maine Potato Board. Few industry organizations handle such a wide breadth of purpose.
Established by an act of the Maine Legislature in 1986, the 11-member elected board is made up of potato growers, dealers and processors. Under them works a staff of eight that carries out the board’s will.
The board has steadily shouldered more hands-on work over the past two decades, filling in gaps left by other state organizations. When it took over the Porter Seed Farm in Masardis in the late 2000s, it was to avoid the state shutting it down.
George McLaughlin was hired to oversee construction at the farm, as it shifted to raising minitubers — lab-grown first generation seed potatoes — through hydroponics rather than in a soil greenhouse.
An agricultural engineer whose preferred potato is a baked superior, McLaughlin designed all manner of infrastructure for farms over the last 18 years, until his retirement this summer. Colleagues call him the board’s “resident MacGyver.”
He and the Potato Board are often the go-between for farmers and shifts in the industry. When GPS technology became common in field equipment, they ran trainings for growers who were sold the equipment, but hadn’t been taught how to use it.
In the wake of Maine’s 2007 adoption of a “low flow” rule limiting extraction from natural waterways, McLaughlin worked with farms to create more efficient irrigation systems that use less water.
The potato houses that dot roads across rural Maine have also significantly modernized in McLaughlin’s tenure, a transition the Potato Board has ushered both through designing facilities for growers and helping them finance them with the Potato Marketing Improvement Fund.
Most of today’s storage buildings are highly insulated and boast significant climate control, keeping potatoes sale-quality for longer.
“The markets are such that you have processors that want potatoes all year round,” McLaughlin said. “If you’re going to stay competitive and stay in business, you need to have a newer style storage system.”
The newest advancement creeping into the industry is drones.
Agricultural engineer Curtis Harrison, who likes a baked or loaded potato, and Potato Board program coordinator Izabelle Higgins, who is partial to her cousin’s smashed potatoes, are piloting a program this year that uses drones to detect problem areas in fields.
“You can scout with a drone exponentially faster than you can scout on foot,” Harrison said. “You can identify areas that have a beetle problem or a certain fungal problem or maybe even just a nutrient deficiency.”
Drones can also be deployed to spray crops with the fungicides, insecticides or herbicides needed to eliminate disease in portions of fields, and do so on a localized level.
“Instead of going out and spraying the entire field, you can pinpoint those areas,” Harrison said. “There’s a cost savings there. There’s an environmental factor there, and an efficiency factor too.”
This trial year is intended as a proof of concept that will show the show growers in the program how it can be useful, and build up a repository of data that will make future drone analysis stronger.
“The more data it has, the more diseases it can detect in the future,” Higgins said.
When diseases are found, the Potato Board has in-house specialists to advise growers on how to treat them. Pathologist Andrew Plant, a twice-baked potato man, manages the Maine Potato Testing Lab in the board’s Presque Isle office.
The lab tests seed potatoes for certification by the Maine Department of Agriculture and interfaces with farmers, who will bring diseased samples for the lab to identify.
“[We’re] keeping an eye on where things stand in terms of what sort of disease pressure might be around for growers,” Plant said. “They might make decisions on what possible fungicides to spray or when to spray them, those sorts of things.”
Early and late blight are always diseases the lab is monitoring, as are strains of Potato Virus Y — one of the world’s most common potato diseases.
The Potato Board also studies field health in other ways. Agronomist Jake Dyer has done a lot of work identifying profitable crop rotations, which he says have trended toward multi-species mixes of plants like clover grass and alfalfa and away from traditional cash crop grains such as barley or canola, where the market has diminished.
“It’s basically kind of giving the soil a rest for a year or two,” Dyer, who prefers new potatoes on the grill, said. “Instead of growing a cash crop, you’re growing organic matter.”
Research like that is a key tenant of the Potato Board’s mission.
“That’s our number one priority,” Tapley, the board’s executive director, said. “Pests evolve, diseases evolve, everything evolves. To stay ahead of that is what’s going to keep our growers sustainable.”
In Aroostook County, where upwards of 90% of the state’s potatoes are harvested, the crop is a unifying cultural symbol. There are festivals celebrating it, and the vegetable continues to prop up the region’s economy. The Potato Board’s goal is to make sure the farmers who grow it continue to do so far into the future.
“The growers in this industry and in this state are, you know, the hardest working people you’ll ever meet,” Tapley said. “But they go every year and plant this crop as a leap of faith. It’s a labor of love.
“To watch them succeed, I think that’s why you have all of these people sitting around this table,” she said, gesturing to her colleagues.
As for how she likes her potatoes, Tapley is a diplomat.
“There is no wrong way to cook a potato,” she said. “The soil that they’re grown in, the environment that we have, they just taste better from Maine.”