|
Become a friend of the Klamath Bucket Brigade All donations are tax deductible |
|
This Website is Dedicated to Alvin Alexander Cheyne January 10, 1921 - June 17, 2005 |
GovTrack.us is an independent tool to help the public research and track the activities in the U.S. Congress, promoting government transparency and civic education through novel uses of technology.
This year’s potato season is almost done and spuds are in the sheds
By LEE JUILLERAT
H&N Regional Editor
November 7, 2010
 |
|
H&N photos by Lee Juillerat John
Walker checks cleaned potatoes ready
for packaging at the Gold Dust
Potato Processors plant.
|
MALIN — “It’s nice to bring in the bounty. To enjoy the smell of potatoes in the cellar,” John Walker said, savoring the moment.
It’s not time to relax yet, but for the owners of Walker Brothers Farms and Gold Dust Potato Processors, the nerve jangling times are over.
The season isn’t quite over, but about 2,200 acres of fields are harvested and the spuds are either in the sheds or bagged and off to buyers.
It’s been a season marked by water shortages. When the Bureau of Reclamation announced in the spring that water supplies to the Klamath Reclamation Project would be a third of normal, Walker scrambled to lease fields watered by wells.
Then came logistical nightmares, including working fields not naturally suited to potatoes and facing increased costs for moving men, equipment and, eventually, potatoes.
“We got enough,” Walker, “but it’s going to be nip and tuck.”
The harvest, which finished Oct. 21, about 10 days later than usual, was not exceptional. He estimates yields were down about 20 percent. Instead of 500 sacks of potatoes per acre, the harvest was 80 to 100 sacks below average.
“Those turned out good,” he said of fields south of Tulelake, but leased fields in Yonna Valley weren’t so good.
“It’s the soils, the climate,” Walker said. “It’s not a potato-growing area or people would be growing potatoes all the time.”
Rocky soils created some problems, and so did discoveries like a field split by an underground spring. Along with not producing potatoes, the damp soil wreaked havoc for harvesters and tractors.
Walker knows every season brings lessons. This year’s was to clean potatoes where they were harvested, before a harvest that included 25 to 30 percent rocks and soil was hauled nearly 30 miles to cleaning and processing plants.
Digging that normally begins in early September
began Sept. 17.
Because frost can damage potatoes — “All it takes is a little spot on that potato and it’s gone” — crews worked 12 to 15 hours a day, often from midnight to early afternoon.
“You just can’t take days off,” Walker said. “We worked it straight through. It was really tough.”
During the peak, 86 people drove 22 trucks, six potato harvesters and handled myriad other chores.
Because of inevitable breakdowns, mechanics from Klamath Falls and elsewhere worked in fields while some workers drove out-and-back trips to Portland or Idaho to retrieve engines, transmissions and other machine parts.
By late October, about 15 full-time workers remained, finishing up maintenance on vehicles, drilling winter wheat and preparing for spring.
“You take days off, but it never shuts down,” Walker explained.
Even with potatoes in sheds and being processed for shipment — Frito-Lay buys about 70 percent of Gold Dust’s potatoes for potato chips, while overseas buyers in South Korea, Malaysia and other countries purchase the remaining 30 percent — the concerns haven’t ended.
On a daily
basis, Walker and Dan Jepsen, an agronomist, check
cellars to ensure there are no problems with
rotting.
“Potatoes don’t get stable in the cellar for 60 days,” Walker said. “Happy potatoes are stable potatoes.”
Walker is happy
when the harvestinduced adrenaline rush calms, when
he can think about a vacation in February and
seriously plan a pheasant hunt in North Dakota.
Additional story:
SOUTH KOREAN COMPANY CHECKS OUT GOLD DUST
 |
| Washed potatoes are hand-inspected by crews before being sent for packaging. |
Eddie Lee, Ha Ju Sang and Sung-Ho Park gathered around laptop computers in a conference room at Gold Dust Potato Processors.
This year, as officials from Orion Snack International Corp. have done since 2005, the trio was finishing 10 days of checking Gold Dust operations and meeting with company officials, including Weston Walker, field manager and international agent for Walker Brothers Farms.
Orion Snack buys Gold Dust potatoes that are shipped to South Korea and made into potato chips.
Eddie Lee, a junior research engineer who translated comments from Sang and Park, said they check potato quality, processing procedures and preparation for shipping.
“The potato quality is good,” Lee explained as Sang, team manager from the Cheongju factory, and Park, general manager for the Foodstuffs Business Team, nodded in agreement.
“Gold Dust helps us, and we help Gold Dust,” he added, breaking into a broad smile.
“Our first year we weren’t smiling, were we?” laughed Weston Walker.
Gold Dust ships about 15 to 18 container loads of potatoes to South Korea a week. From Malin, potatoes in bags weighing 1,800 to 2,400 pounds are trucked to Portland and loaded for the three-week overseas voyage.
“It’s been a good learning experience to see how they can be best sent because they want just as high a quality as Frito-Lay,” said John Walker, referring to the U.S. company that buys about 70 percent of the company’s chipping potatoes. “We’re here to please. That’s our goal.”
Side Bars
ROBERT RICE, owner, Rice Feed & Supply, Dairy
No surprises this season: ‘Kind of what we expected’
It’s been a tough year, he said, with his usual sales of seed and other items way below average.
“Hope it doesn’t happen again,” the owner of Rice Feed and Supply Store in Dairy said tersely.
For Rice, there were no surprises or lessons. As he puts it, “Kind of what we expected.”
Asked if he has any ideas on ways to solve water shortage related problems, he replied by asking more questions: “How do you generate water? How do you lower power bills? Taking out the dams is not the answer. Somewhere down the line, they’re going to have to figure out that people come before fish.”
T.J. WOODLEY, district manager, Klamath Soil and Water Conservation District
This year’s growing season in the Klamath Basin was bad, T.J. Woodley said, but it could have been much worse.
“It was a catastrophe that turned into a disaster,” said Woodley, district manager of the Klamath Soil and Water Conservation District.
When the growing season ended, irrigators had used more water than they originally anticipated, but much less than they receive during a normal water year.
Early in the year, irrigators did not know what to expect. Some speculated that no water would be available for the Klamath Reclamation Project, and others remained hopeful they would get their full allotment, Woodley said.
The Klamath Soil and Water Conservation District is a tax funded organization that provides advice and tutelage for irrigators. It also operates several programs aimed at instituting better land and water conservation and management practices.
Woodley said three to four times more people than usual have come to the district seeking advice or help this year.
The conservation district’s cover crop program, which helped farmers plant vegetation on 8,300 acres of barren fields to help prevent erosion, was very successful, he said.
The conservation district also relied on a no-till program, lending farm equipment that plants crops without tilling to protect soil from drying out.
While some water did flow through irrigation canals and these programs helped, irrigators in the Basin could not totally escape the drought. Woodley recalled driving around the fields near his house in Malin and seeing hundreds of acres sitting waterless and barren.
“The visual of that landscape is something that really hit home for me,” he said.
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted
material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit
research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml