In Idaho, potato is still king

PINGREE, Idaho — Wisconsin means cheese, Florida means oranges, Texas means beef, Maine means lobsters — and Idaho means potatoes.

Not just any old spuds. Not Yukon Golds or Finns or Red Blisses but long, burly, starchy, thick-skinned russets, a variety developed from a mutant Early Rose potato that the great plantsman Luther Burbank discovered in his New England garden in 1872. Ensuing experiments lasted almost 40 years, but Burbank russets, known today to most Americans simply as Idahos, proved to be ideal for baking, ideal for mashing and, crucially in this fast-food era, ideal for French fries. With cool nights, warm days, volcanic soil, low rainfall and ample water for irrigation, Idaho proved to be the ideal place to grow them.

Here in the flatlands along the Snake River in southeastern Idaho, 100 miles west of Jackson Hole, Wyo., and the Teton range, farmers like Richard Polatis, many of them descendants of Mormon pioneers, grow potatoes on huge spreads. Polatis, 56, farms 10,000 acres, with 1,800 acres in potatoes and the rest in wheat, barley and sugar beets, in the same area where his grandparents homesteaded.

The potato is still king in Idaho, which in a good year produces 20 billion pounds of tubers, close to a third of the American total and enough to give three pounds to every person on the planet. "Idaho," the license plates still proclaim, "Famous Potatoes." A local company still makes a chocolate-covered candy bar with a marshmallow center called the Idaho Spud.

"This is the potato state," insists 94-year-old J.R. Simplot, the grand old man of the industry. "We led the parade. We still do."

But times are changing. Only 15 years ago, there were about 1,600 potato farmers in the state; now there are no more than half that many, according to Mel Anderson, the retired president of the Idaho Potato Commission. Growing spuds, once one of the more rudimentary agricultural activities, has gone high-tech in recent decades, and high-tech inevitably means high cost.

A single spiderlike irrigation boom, a quarter-mile long, which rolls around a center pivot, costs $68,000, Polatis told me, and he has a lot of them. Tractors cost $130,000, and he has eight. A mammoth harvester that digs 12 rows at once, a swath 36 feet wide, separating the potatoes from the dirt and stems and dumping them onto a truck, costs up to $95,000, although it is used for only a few weeks a year.