Posted on 04/13/2021 6:31:33 AM PDT by mylife
Do you want fries with that? Potatoes are a very popular side dish.
The most common potato variety is the Russet Burbank, which is mainly grown in the Pacific Northwest. But as the climate there gets warmer and drier, growing these tubers may become more difficult.
Richard Novy is with the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Idaho. He says to water their crops, many farmers in his state depend on mountain snowpack, which melts slowly throughout the growing season.
“And so if we have less snowfall up in the mountains or earlier melting of that snowpack, that can impact our irrigation going into the future,” he says.
Hot, dry weather can reduce farmers’ yields. And it can make the potatoes grow unattractive bumps.
Novy says another risk posed by rising temperatures is that more of the potatoes’ starch content will convert to sugar.
“Then when you fry that tuber,” he says, “you’ll get a very dark potato chip or a dark french fry, so not desirable by most consumers.”
To help the industry adapt, Novy and other scientists have been developing new, more resilient potato varieties.
So even as the climate changes, diners can continue to order fries with that.
“may become more difficult.“
You see what they did there?!?
yessir...
Potatoes are grown all over the world...
What a pant load. The growers are making more money per pound on smaller designer potatoes than the Russetts. Next time you go to dinner and have a baked potato look at how small it is compared to the big bakers from a few years ago.
The big Russetts are being still being sold for fries,tater tots and other frozen packaged meals but the crop acreage is down.
I would sure love to be in a place where the climate is getting warmer and drier. We are just getting past one of the most miserable 6 months that I can remember.
Bullshit. More fear mongering.
I grew up in Southeast Idaho and I well remember when the breakneck harvesting was an annual event because the farmers waited until the first hard frost to kill the vines and then tried to get the potatoes out of the ground before the frost sunk deeper down to the potatoes. Schools were dismissed for one to three weeks to free us students and I earned my school clothing and Christmas gifting money picking potatoes with the wire baskets and then later working on combines.
The potatoes are shipped from China to Idaho and repackaged
I can’t stand sweet potato fries. I like my sweet potatos candied or pureed with maple syrup and brown sugar baked in the oven with slightly charred mini marshmallows on top. Maybe baked with plenty of butter and brown sugar on top.
That’s just me.
Year after year it seems that the snow load in the Cascades and I am sure the Northern Rockies and the Blue mountains is slightly larger than average.
We in the PNW just had what was described as a record snowfall, and rain. It literally hadn’t warmed up until one week ago above 55. Yet the papers are now reporting that the gubbermint is stating that we are going to have a record wild fire season this year. The reason stated is a spate of brush fires. Likely caused by people burning brush as the winter was incredibly wet and is now drying out.
Harvest sector be October but I know they moved it up when studies showed potatoes harvested at cooler temperatures bruised more. I recall frosty sixteen hour days in the fields. One year we worked fields far from the owner’s home. We harvest workers ate sack lunches we brought from home. Unfortunately the owners took off to the home for lunch and forgot to give us our lunches which had been stashed in their pickup. We were stuck with muddy raw potatoes with a nail file to cut it up.
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