American Falls, Idaho, farmer Klaren Koompin still has about 130,000 hundredweight sacks of spuds left to market from his 2019 crop. They were grown under contract, but he’s not sure if processors are going to need them any time soon.
“There is that hanging out there,” he said. “Are the fryers and dehydrators going to need everything they have contracted?”
When it comes to COVID-19’s impact on the economy, there appears to be at least some glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Many states, including Idaho, have released plans to reopen their economies in stages. That has created some optimism in farm country that maybe things are starting to get back to normal.
But farmers and agricultural industry leaders caution it will take more than just a few weeks or months for the farming industry, which has been hammered by declining commodity prices linked to the coronavirus outbreak, to get back to normal.
On top of that uncertainty, Koompin had his contracted acreage for potatoes cut by 50 percent for the 2020 growing season.
“That’s huge. It means we will plant … 500 fewer acres than we did last year,” he said. “It’s a big deal.”
Kam Quarles, CEO of the National Potato Council, said nobody thinks that resumption of the normal farming economy will be like flipping a light switch.
“Most optimistically, it will take many months of gradual attempts to get back to where we were,” he said.
The stay-at-home orders have caused major disruptions for many agricultural commodities, including Idaho’s important potato industry, which contributes billions of dollars to the state’s economy.
Sales of potatoes and potato products through food service channels such as restaurants and schools have basically ceased, said Blair Richardson, president and CEO of Potatoes USA, which markets and promotes U.S. spuds.
Americans used to spend the majority of their food dollars outside their homes but “now the majority of our food dollars are being spent at home, by a wide margin,” he said. “The demand channels have just shifted dramatically.”
There has been a major effort by the Idaho Potato Commission and other spud industry groups to try to redirect potatoes that were destined to food service channels over to retail outlets, where fresh potato sales have soared.
The potato chip market is doing great, as are dehydrated potato products, Richardson said.
But that has not been enough to offset the loss of sales through food service channels, he added.
The U.S. potato industry is a $4 billion industry in terms of farm cash receipts or what farmers get for their spuds. Sixty percent of those sales are to the food service industry.
“The food service sector is such an important part of our economy. If we don’t get that back up, soon, it’s going to be a very difficult thing for the potato industry,” Richardson said.
Because of the dramatic decrease in food service sales, many potato processors have stopped operating or significantly cut back. That has sent ripple effects through farm country.
The farming industry won’t return to pre-coronavirus levels quickly, said Idaho Barley Commission Executive Director Laura Wilder.
“It’s going to take some time and it could take up to two years,” she said.
A lot of barley grown in Idaho, the nation’s top barley-producing state, is turned into malt that ends up being used in beer brewing plants in Mexico. That nation considered brewing as a non-essential business so breweries there were shut down, which has impacted the delivery of Idaho malt to Mexico.
Idaho farmers who grow malt barley have contracts with malt houses to move the barley there on certain dates. But because of the slowdown in transporting malt to Mexico, “less of that barley is being stored at the malt houses and more on the farm right now,” Wilder said. “Everything is just backed up and the industry is working through those challenges.”
Most of Idaho’s barley is grown for malt but some is used for human food or animal feed.
Four percent of Idaho’s barley production is exported for food and feed, primarily to Asia, and there have been some slowdowns in those markets as well, Wilder said.
Idaho food barley acres could decrease somewhat this year as a result, she said.
In the midst of all the concern and uncertainty, farmers and ranchers continue to move forward with their normal plans to produce food.
“The farming part is happening. The producers are farming like normal and all the businesses that support farmers are open,” Wilder said. “It’s just that there is a lot of uncertainty in the markets domestically and globally because there is not commerce happening the way it normally is.”
And while farmers are moving ahead, at the same time they are doing what they can to prevent spread of the virus.