We decided not to feel sorry for ourselves and our late potato harvest after reading Forum Communications reporter Ann Bailey's article, Potatoes in the field looking bleak, in the Brainerd Dispatch:
With more than half of North Dakota’s potatoes still in the field, the outlook for harvesting a good quality crop after the latest round of rain and snowfall is poor.
“It’s pretty bleak,” said Ted Kreis, Northern Potato Growers Association marketing and communications director. As of Sunday, Oct. 6, 45% of North Dakota’s potato crop had been harvested, National Agricultural Statistics Service-North Dakota said. Last year, 73% of the state’s potato fields had been harvested by that day, the statistics service said. On average, 69% of the North Dakota crop is harvested as of Oct. 6.
In Minnesota, 68% of the state’s potatoes had been harvested as of Oct. 6, which meant the harvest was eight days behind average, National Agricultural Statistics Service-Minnesota said.
A late, wet spring, combined with as much as 10 inches of rain during the past month has hampered the harvest of potatoes — and every other crop in northeast North Dakota and northwest Minnesota.
The percentage of potatoes harvested may have increased slightly since Oct. 6 because a few farmers were able to get into the field earlier this week, but the majority of the North Dakota crop still is in the ground.
The remaining acres will be difficult, if not impossible, to harvest.
“It doesn’t look promising because we were getting a lot of rain, and the ground was already saturated before this happened,” Kreis said Thursday, Oct. 10. “This” was the rain and snow that began falling across northeast North Dakota and northwest Minnesota Thursday morning. . . .
Besides potatoes and sugar beets, hundreds of thousands of wheat, edible beans, soybeans, sunflowers and corn acres are unharvested in northeastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota. If and when those crops are harvested will depend on when the snow melts, and, if it does, when the ground freezes so it is firm enough to support combines.
Snow began falling here in Summit about 7:30 p.m., after a day of rain. We're not much for toxic taters, but farmers in the path of the storm have our sympathy.
Photo: An industrial tater harvester. Photo by Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald.
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