The year begins not in January, but in April, when it's time to plant. The field is disced in preparation for planting. It's not unlike opening a bottle of wine and letting it breath. When you're planting tens of thousands of potatoes, you don't cut each eye and plant them carefully in the ground. They all get chopped up at random and dumped into the planter. A tractor pulls the planter down the rows while someone rides on the back of it holding what we in the industry refer to as a stick. This person has the all important job of poking at the potatoes if they get clogged.
Before too long little potato plants pop up and sprout flowers. They need to be watered, fertilized and sprayed with one hundred dollar per gallon pesticides to protect the little guys from the evil potato bug.
Many farms have permanent irrigation systems that crawl around the field giving the thirsty little potatoes water. If the field isn't outfitted with one of those units, a contraption with a giant garden hose about 6 inches around is used to dispurse the liquid. It's pulled along the field by a cable attached to a tractor. One nice advantage to living on a farm is, while you city folk are in the back yard jumping through your cute little garden sprinkler, farm kids get to play in a sprinkler spitting out up to a million gallons of water a day.
Some time in the summer, workers walk up and down the rows spotting varieties of potato that aren't supposed to be there. This is known as rouging. Different varieties blossom different colored flowers. When a blue or yellow flower is found in a sea of white, it is yanked out by hand so the future buyers get what they paid for.
In September the potatoes are harvested. A couple weeks before harvesting, chemicals are sprayed on the field to kill the vines so they can easily separate from the potatoes. The harvester scoops potatoes up out of the ground and separates them from most of the vines and giant man-eating rocks. They are then carried by conveyor belt up to the workers who separate the rocks and rotten potatoes from the good ones. The deer come out in abundance at this time to graze on the tasty snack, seemingly unbothered by the noisy harvester and tractors.
The potatoes, and any rocks missed, are transported by wagon to the warehouse where workers pick out the leftover rocks. "Scabbied up ones" as I refer to the potatoes with scabs, are separated into crates for deer feed. This is also the part where a small family farmer will pick out the best of the best by hand to sell for your dinner table. If you've never had any potatoes bought right off the farm, you don't know what you're missing with those teeny supermarket variations. Or worse yet, potatoes from a box (full body shiver). Here in the warehouse, the potatoes will stay until March when they're sold. A proper temperature must be maintained in the building so they don't freeze if it gets too cold, or sweat if it gets too warm. Yes, potatoes can sweat. And since they're about 80% water, they shrink.
Many may think a farmer has nothing to do in winter and it must be so nice. Winter is actually the time when a potato farmer will repair and maintain the heavy equipment used. Also, in the case of our farm, my dad has a gi-normous snow blower attached to our John Deere tractor that he uses to clear the driveways of our helpless neighbors trapped at home after a Michigan blizzard. This is also the time when the seed potatoes are sold to buyers across the country and into Canada. We used to sell to Frito-Lay, and we would joke when we pulled a green or brown chip out of the bag and say it must be one of ours. But alas, Frito-Lay abandoned the family farmer several years ago, choosing to instead buy from large factory farms.
Come March, other farmers send their semi trucks to be filled with lovely Makarewicz Seed Farm potatoes. They pass one more inspection when workers filter out any more scabbed specimens. Then they're trucked off to be planted again. Of course, we keep a few to replant in our own fields in April. We also plant rotation crops that put valuable nutrients back in the ground so our little potatoes can grow big and strong. Well, that's about it. If you're interested in purchasing any of the aforementioned lovely potatoes, contact Sam at 1-877-546-3286 or slmarker55 at yahoo dot com. We're located in
Elmira, MI.
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