Oct 30, 2017First year for Idaho Big Harvest meeting, focusing on growers and on potato quality
There is a reason why the official name of the harvest meeting this fall in Blackfoot, Idaho is The BIG Idaho Potato Harvest Meeting. Event organizers want to make it clear that there are reasons for growers from across the state to make the trip.
“This is the first year for a consolidated meeting in hopes of attracting a lot of growers and really just building off our joint unity as various associations and to come together,” said Shawn Boyle, president of the Idaho Grower Shippers Association (IGSA). “Hopefully it will be a tradition that people will look forward to for years to come.”
The harvest meeting grew out of the annual whistle stop tour held by the IGSA and the Idaho Potato Commission(IPC). Frank Muir, president of the IPC, said the harvest meeting will have all the information that attendees would expect from the whistle stop, but is intended for a wider audience.
He said the focus of the meeting this year is how efforts to grow the Idaho potato industry rest on the underlying quality of Idaho potatoes.
“We’re all about growing the Idaho brand, in both volume and value,” Muir said. “It’s a combination of having a premium marketing program, backed by a premium product, and that comes back to quality.”
As at the annual IGSA meeting in Sun Valley, Muir will give a presentation on the IPC’s marketing efforts for the coming year. He said it’s important that growers receive the same information that shippers received earlier in the year.
Both Muir and Boyle said the location, date and topics of the BIG Idaho Potato Harvest Meeting were all selected to make sure it will be accessible to growers. They chose a location that most growers could make it to in a day, a date after harvest is almost complexly finished and they made sure to have a variety of topics that would be useful to growers.
After informing attendees of the IPC marketing plan, Muir said he will give a talk about how potato quality fits into that plan.
“We are the premium potato brand,” he said. “If we’re going continue to push demand, we have got to make sure we maintain the premium brand image we have.”
Other speakers include Nora Olsen and Mike Thornton from Idaho State University Extension, who will talk about the top 10 things growers can do to preserve quality and prevent bruise. Olsen will focus on quality issues during the packing and shipping phases while Thornton will speak about preventing bruising during the harvest process.
Thornton said that most of the information they will cover will include things that growers may have heard before but that can be overlooked.
“They’re easy to forget in the heat of the battle when you’re taking potatoes out of storage and trying to get things done,” he said.
Thornton said they will emphasize that thinking about quality shouldn’t end when harvest is finished and that proper training, what he calls the human factor, is essential.
“How one person who’s not paying attention to bruise can erase all your efforts,” he said, giving the example of one employee who’s letting potatoes drop three feet off the piler.
“You can undo everything,” he said.
Other presentations include a talk by Idaho Falls attorney Lance Schuster on the upcoming implementation of the transportation rule under the Food Safety Modernization Act.
“We’re just on the edge of those things being enforced so I think it’s something that’s really valuable for our membership to learn about,” said Boyle.
The IGSA will also give out information on the outlook for agricultural labor in the coming year and IGSA associate member Cooper Norman will present a talk on cyber security on the farm. After that, candidates for Idaho governor will address the meeting. Potatoes USA and the National Potato Council will then give out information on their efforts and during dinner there will be an auction to benefit the political action committee (PAC) organized by the United Potato Growers of America and the IGSA.
“I think that the PAC does some strong things for the potato industry,” Boyle said. “It supports pro-potato candidates. The PAC’s keeping their eye out for somebody that cares about the potato industry’s concerns and the industry’s future in Idaho.”
The event will also feature motivational guest speaker, Kory Puderbaugh, a silver medalist at the Rio Paralympics in wheelchair rugby. Puderbaugh was born with no hands or feet, was adopted by an American couple from a Polish orphanage and later graduated from high school in Eagle, Idaho.
“He has a great story to tell,” Muir said. “Everything was stacked against him from the get-go.”
Aside from the individual sessions and speakers, Boyle said, having growers being able to meet with shippers, and even possibly bankers and journalists, allows a unique opportunity for networking and information sharing.
“We want to make our membership proud to be a part of the potato industry, to build off the name Idaho has and make it even better,” Boyle said.
—Scott Stuntz, managing editor