Potato priorities for 2025 clear amid political change
As the calendar flips to 2025, fresh challenges, including a new presidential administration, await American agriculture in general and the potato industry in particular. However, core issues foremost on the plate of potato advocates remain largely unchanged going into the new year.
“Congress changes every two years in some way, so we’re dealing with this all the time,” Kam Quarles, National Potato Council CEO, told Spudman in a recent interview. “From our perspective, it all starts with coming up with solid policy positions that matter for the industry.”
Quarles and Blair Richardson, Potatoes USA president and CEO, talked with Spudman about three paramount points in 2025 and beyond.
LABOR LOGJAM
A hot-button topic as Donald Trump prepares for his second term in the White House is immigration. The topic is often talked about in conjunction with ag labor concerns and the reform many industry insiders say is needed to the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker visa program.
The common-sense solutions needed, such as properly documenting farm workers, have remained the same for 20 years, Quarles said.
“You can understand people’s emotional frustration,” he said. “But I don’t know any reasonable person who has sat there and said that the farmworkers who are doing all of this work to put food on our table are the big problem here. They’re not. The vast majority of reasonable people understand that agriculture’s in a unique place.”
Quarles estimated that 70% of the existing workforce on American farms is undocumented.
“So the notion that you’re just going to deport all of those people — the consequence of that is you’re going to shut down about 70% of labor- dependent agriculture in the U.S., or severely impair it,” he said. “So that’s not really reasonable. The reasonable thing is to figure out how to enable those people to become fully legal in the United States. That certainly doesn’t mean citizenship, but at least get a handle on who they are and put some protections around them that are for the United States.
“You’ve got to identify them. There have to be rules by which they remain in the country. … But the inflationary impact of trying to deport those folks — for a country that’s screaming about high prices, wait until you see what happens when you don’t have any labor on farms to fill folks’ grocery stores.”
The H-2A program itself “has not been modernized in 40 years,” Quarles said. Intended to provide seasonal labor on American farms, the program often incurs criticism of governmental overreach, including mandated pay rates that vary by locality. While some allege that the program makes it harder for American workers to compete for low-paying farm jobs, others say that H-2A regulations do not go far enough to protect workers.
What is needed, Quarles said, is “a guest worker program that actually responds to the current and the future needs of American agriculture.
“It doesn’t do any good if two farms are sitting side by side, and one is following all the rules and the other one is essentially operating around the system. If you’re going to do all of this work to deal with the existing workforce and make sure the future is covered with the guest worker program, you’ve got to make sure that everybody is following those rules.”
TALKING TRADE
With the U.S.’s agricultural trade deficit, forecast at a record $32 billion for fiscal year 2024, expected to grow to $42.5 billion in 2025, the topic of trade is taking on enhanced importance — and tariffs are tied to trade.
According to taxfoundation.org, the first Trump administration imposed nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans by levying tariffs on thousands of products valued at approximately $380 billion in 2018 and 2019. The Biden administration kept most of those tariffs in place and announced tariff hikes on an additional $18 billion of Chinese goods this past May.
Elected to a second term in November, Trump has proposed tariffs of 60% on Chinese goods and a tax of between 10% and 20% on every product imported from all U.S. trading partners. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates tariffs of the proposed scope would cost the average U.S. household about $2,600 a year. Agricultural insiders worry about potential reverberations with long-time trading partners. The U.S. has long been the top exporter of agricultural products and exported $178.7 billion in 2023. The country exports 20% of potatoes grown domestically, contributing nearly $4.8 billion to the domestic economy and supporting nearly 34,000 jobs.
The value of U.S. potato exports reached a record $2.3 billion from July 2023 to July 2024.
“U.S. agriculture has to find homes in foreign markets for what we produce,” Quarles said. “Using tariffs in a targeted way as leverage to get folks to the table, that could yield significant benefits if used sparingly.”
Bolstering the U.S.’s export numbers is a Mexican market that fully opened to U.S. fresh potatoes in May 2022. In 2022-2023, Mexico was the top destination for U.S. fresh potato exports, accounting for $111 million in exports and about a third of total U.S. potato exports.
Opening the Mexican market was an effort spanning presidential administrations from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden, Quarles said. The negotiations illustrated both the power of perseverance and of targeted tariffs to bring countries to the bargaining table, such as when the United States-Mexico- Canada Agreement resolved issues with its predecessor, the North America Free Trade Agreement, in 2020.
“That entire negotiation was set off by tariffs being applied both to Canada and Mexico by the Trump administration. Those tariffs basically forced the parties to the table to start talking about revising what was then NAFTA,” Quarles said. “(But) if tariffs are put on that result in retaliatory tariffs as a response from valuable export markets, that will become extremely costly for not just the potato industry but all of American agriculture.”
With the Mexican market showing the benefits of open access, U.S. attention is now firmly focused on Japan. While the U.S. has exported potatoes for processing to the country since 2016, negotiations to fully open the market to fresh, or table stock, potatoes have dragged into their third decade.
“We have access for frozen and chipping potatoes to go to processing companies in Japan,” Richardson said. “The agreement to allow fresh chipping stock potatoes into Japan is in its 20th year this year and is a great example of how a well-considered agreement between two countries can benefit consumers and companies and growers on both sides of the agreement.”
NPC has estimated that full access to the Japanese market would result in a 10% to 15% increase in global U.S. fresh potato exports, or $150 million to $200 million annually.
“The glacial pace of them considering this market access request is comically absurd,” said Quarles, who visited Japan most recently in October to continue talks. “At some point, Japan is going to want something from the United States, in agriculture or outside of it, and we have to be at the front of the line.
“If the Trump administration considers using tariffs as leverage to get them to the table, to create that opportunity for Japan to want something, then it’s an interesting possibility for creating the leverage necessary to break open this very, very, very long market access process.”
Richardson noted a change in global trade spurred by increased competition from countries including China, India and Turkey in frozen processing potato products. More countries producing their own products will eventually increase overall demand, he said, “but in the short term, it’s going to be disruptive as some of these companies start competing and offering very low prices. Our companies here in the United States and also companies in northern Europe will have to fight for market share.”
The shifting production landscape has led to the U.S. becoming a net importer of potatoes, which is “a big change for us,” Richardson said. “It’s just really been because we have not been able to supply the total demand for potatoes in the United States.
“The interesting thing is that the demand has been so good that now European processors are starting to explore plans to build processing capacity here in the United States to fulfill that, because it’s very expensive to ship those potato products across the ocean and pay the tariffs. So I think over time, we’re going to see that import number reverse and go back down to a more traditional level. But for the next couple of years, we’re going to see some disruption here in the United States.”
DIETARY DEBATE
Anticipated administrative changes also are creating uncertainty around another long-running debate in the potato industry: the federal dietary guidelines issued every five years and potatoes’ place in them.
The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee completed a two-day meeting on Oct. 22 to discuss draft recommendations to send to the Department of Health and Human Services and the USDA. Guidelines were set to be published in December, after which the public will be able to submit comments.
While verbal recommendations to the full committee indicated that an earlier proposal to make starchy vegetables interchangeable with grains — effectively declassifying potatoes as a vegetable — has been abandoned, the committee is expected to recommend reducing the intake of starchy vegetables. Current guidelines recommend five cups a week of starchy vegetables.
While potatoes are high in carbohydrates that the body digests quickly, causing blood sugar and insulin to spike and then drop — known as a high glycemic load — more recent research has highlighted the benefits of resistant starch, a type of carbohydrate found in high levels in cooked potatoes. Resistant starch may help consumers feel full, favorably impact blood lipid and blood glucose levels, and increase good bacteria in the colon, according to 2016 findings published on the PubMed website.
“We started this whole process with a group of experts, air quotes, suggesting that we should consider whether to keep potatoes — which are America’s favorite vegetable — classified as a vegetable,” Quarles said. “That expert panel has discarded that idea, but they’ve replaced it — in a country where they’ve acknowledged that people do not eat enough vegetables — with advice to Americans to eat less vegetables.”
It remained to be seen in late November whether those guidelines gained traction with the lame duck leadership in both departments.
“One of the questions going forward is, will the current administration finalize these dietary guidelines?” Quarles said. “And then, if they seek to do that, will the Trump administration then accept them, or will they pull them back and rewrite them, or just discard the whole process? Those are unknowns.”
Added Richardson, whose organization focuses on potato marketing and research: “I just hope that we use good common sense and accept the fact that Americans consider potatoes a vegetable.”
While potatoes remain America’s most widely produced and consumed vegetable, according to the USDA, Potatoes USA has noticed changes in that consumption, Richardson said.
“We’re seeing more and more focus on smaller bags because consumers — especially the younger generations — are very sensitive to waste. They don’t want to buy 10 pounds or 20 pounds of potatoes or any food product and risk wasting it,” he said. “Also there’s a growing demand for smaller potatoes that cook quickly and easily in an air fryer or in an oven.”
Those changing consumer habits have spurred innovation in varieties and packaging, and “I wouldn’t think that that’s going to change in the next couple of years,” Richardson said.
A change he’d like to see is potato purchasers helping to fuel the growing movement toward greater sustainability. Sustainable growing practices can be expensive because of factors including stricter sourcing and certification standards and increased labor needs.
“Consumers are very interested in the idea of sustainability. They don’t always put their money behind it,” he said. “It’s an expensive proposition for growers. At some point — whether it’s potatoes or any other commodity — they’re going to have to be rewarded for it.”
Both Richardson and Quarles expect 2025 to be busy, with work to keep other ag priorities, including the passage of a farm bill, high on the new administration’s agenda.
“You’ve got to give them a shot and see where they’re going,” Quarles said. “They’re going to put people in place who are going to give us an audience. You’ve got to assume that everybody going in there wants to solve problems.”
