For years now, Rob has been writing a quarterly “Farmer’s View” on the UK Potato Market, which we have hoped helps bridge the gap between the growing side of potatoes, to the eating part!   This season more than most, the growing conditions of last summer are really starting to be evident on daily purse strings.  We thought that since it is so important, we would add it into our blog so that, hopefully, going forward the Farmer’s View will be a bit easier to find.

This was February’s…..

The UK Potato Market  –  A Farmer’s View

February 2013

Following the awful summer last year, which produced poor crops of all types, most people involved in the potato trade (and those involved in the majority of other food sectors) are “wishing their time away” and looking forward to a more normal season.

Potato prices continued to rise leading up to Christmas and now seem to have levelled out at the highest we have ever known. Currently there is some price easing for the poorer quality smaller samples but good samples with a reasonable proportion of baking potatoes are holding at the very high price and are still in relatively short supply.

As I mentioned in the last Farmer’s View, I had hoped that this year’s changes in “normal practice”( that is large quantities of imported fresh potatoes from Northern Europe together with a much better utilisation of all UK stocks) might mitigate the shortage.  To a certain extent this seems to have happened according to the British Potato Council’s recent figures. At the end the growing season they estimated that the total crop was 24% down compared to last year. The figures recently published which estimated the stock at the end of November showed stock to be 18% down compared to last year.

Looking further ahead, we are very concerned that the acreage of potatoes planted this year will be considerably less than 2012. We know that some growers are either throwing in the towel or reducing their acreage because of the dreadful season we have just experienced. The higher price of wheat will tempt some to decide that the hassle and risk of trying to make a profitable margin from a crop of potatoes is not worth it when a much easier and safer route would be to grow more wheat.

We also know that some of the larger potato growers who rent land from other farmers, are struggling to find enough available land. Last autumn many farmers will have experienced the grower making a very wet muddy mess of one of their fields and then, on top of that, it will have been too late and too wet to be able to sow the following wheat crop. It is understandable that some of them will decide that enough is enough and not rent out land again. I understand there are also some farmers who have decided not to grow any crop on the wettest land this year, leaving the field fallow so allowing the soil to recover.

So far we have been able to source enough good quality baking potatoes to meet demand and I have no reason to suppose that the situation will change unless it is another late growing season! In autumn I was wishing for an Indian summer which we didn’t get, but now I am hoping we will be blessed with an early spring.  If a few of the early growers can get a window of fine weather to make a good start to the season’s planting, the old crop would then not have to last so long and it might prevent the worst scenario which would be more price increases. Let’s hope for some sunshine soon!

Rob Bannister