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Potatoes

As a Whatcom County potato royal, assuming agnatic primogeniture, I was naturally interested in a recent feature in Science on worldwide potato production. Potatoes have become more important for the last decade, especially in India and China.

My father and grandfather raised potatoes for sale directly to grocery stores. Now, only seed potatoes are grown commercially in Whatcom County. Raising seed potatoes is more exacting than raising potatoes for food. Heroic efforts are required to ensure that the seed runs true to type. For example, seed potatoes must be rotated with other crops to ensure that strains don’t intermingle. Sustaining an acre of seed potatoes requires control of several acres of land that can be rotated through other crops like hay and corn.

In the 1960s, world food production soared in what was called the Green Revolution, much different than today’s Green New Deal. The Green Revolution was the result of newly developed strains of cereal grains, mostly wheat and rice, with higher yields, shorter growing seasons, and greater disease resistance. Coupled with modern fertilizers, pest and herbicides, and mechanized farming, world food supplies in increased rapidly and health improved. The current rise in prosperity in India and China is partially due to the Green Revolution which preceded the current computer technology revolution.

Potatoes did not play a large role in the Green Revolution due to a peculiarity in the genetic mechanism of potatoes, which is different from most species. Compare potatoes to humans. Except for sperm and egg cells, each human cell has two sets of identical chromosomes. Sex is all about recombining chromosomes from a sperm and egg into a new double set. Sometimes children inherit the best traits from each of their parents. But they can also inherit the worst of each. Most of the time the combination is a mix of good and bad. In the long scheme of things, this continual mixing produces a variety of offspring that are able to thrive in a wide variety of challenging environments.

Potatoes are different. They can have as many as six copies of each chromosome. When potatoes pollenate and produce seeds (potato sex), the potential variation is huge because there are so many moving parts that can be fitted together in so many ways. More variation means more chances for beneficial varieties. But the combinations are random. Some are good, some are bad.

In the long term, bad combinations that fail to thrive, die and disappear. But in the short term, you have failing plants. Farmers don’t want to waste time and effort growing failures. This is why potatoes are not grown from seed: the farmers never know what they will get from a potato seed. Therefore, potatoes are propagated from pieces of the potato tuber (the part you eat) instead of seed. Without the tingle of sex, the resulting plants are identical to their parents. After all, no one grows spuds for the excitement.

But propagation by cuttings has problems. Seeds are miracles of packaging. Kept dry, a sack of seeds (like wheat or rice kernels) is good for several years without special handling. Add warmth, water, and nutrients, and plants spring up. A single pound of wheat seeds can yield twelve thousand wheat plants. A pound of seed potatoes will yield around ten potato plants. Not only do you need more pounds of seed potatoes than pounds wheat seed for a crop, seed potatoes have to be kept from freezing and they can’t be kept over very easily for a second season.

In addition, developing new strains of potatoes is more difficult than creating new strains of cereal crops. Potato variations may be plentiful but getting a promising potato to breed true is often difficult and time consuming.

If they are so much trouble, why bother with potatoes as a food crop? The answer is simple: my grandpa could get more potatoes with less effort from his land than he could wheat or oats. And he could sell potatoes directly to grocery stores instead of selling it a milling company that would take their share of the profits from the finished product. That meant more profit for him.

My grandpa only raised wheat and oats for his cattle. He could feed them grain directly or take it to the feed mill in Ferndale to have it ground to make it more palatable and nutritious for the cattle , but he never sold grain to a middle man.

Potatoes are good human food directly from the ground. Although potatoes have less protein than wheat, potato protein is more usable for humans. A person eating only potatoes will live longer and be healthier than a person eating only wheat bread. We all know that a diet from a variety of sources is best, but not everyone in the world can make the choices that are effortless for most Americans.

Oddly, the Irish potato famine, which caused the 19th century wave of Irish immigration to the US, was the result of a disastrous combination of potato characteristics: potatoes grew easily in Ireland and the population increased on a sustaining diet consisting mostly of potatoes. Unfortunately, all the potatoes in Ireland were genetically identical due to propagation by cuttings. When a disease, the blight, hit, the entire potato harvest was affected for several consecutive years and the people starved.

Today, post Green Revolution techniques have made potatoes an important new crop. Propagating potatoes by seed has become feasible, and other techniques have developed new varieties that are more productive and support two potato crops per year in some climates. My grandpa’s crop is becoming more important for world nutrition for the same reasons he became potato king: a high yield and a healthy product that is palatable without further processing.

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Libraries and Optimism

Last week I attended the Washington Library Association’s conference in Yakima. It reminded me how important libraries are, especially today. When I look at the way people are split today, I am deeply grateful that I live in he 21st century and not in the 19th or even the 20th century.

I know many people wish they were back in the “good old days,” but don’t look to this reader of old books for support.

In the 19th century, in the United States, we fought the bloodiest war in our history over slavery. Opinions were so strong that brother killed brother and mothers killed sons and daughters over opinions that were comparable to our divisions today over issues like race, gender, immigration. In my opinion, if people travelled and moved from state to state as little now as they did in 1850, if communications were as slow and expensive today as they were in 1860, we would be on the verge of another shooting civil war.

But we are not.

In the 20th century, we fought two devastating world wars. Today, we have a trade war, we have cyberwar, treaties are being revoked, and nations are contemplating building their arsenals in ways we have not heard of for fifty years. There was an assassination in Turkey a short time ago that is as diplomatically catastrophic as the assassination that started World War I, but I do not fear another shooting and bombing war world war.

Nations are now mutually dependent. The isolation of war will devastate the globe faster than the explosions and bullets of 20th century wars. I noticed this morning that Caterpillar has put out a decreased earnings notice to the stock analysts due to the increased price of steel. A sign that the trade war is has set its own back burn.

The fire of war will begin to snuff itself out before the weapons discharge.

Why am I so optimistic? Well, I recently read a book recommended by one of the smartest people on this planet, Bill Gates. The book by Hans Rosling is called Factfulness. Rosling is a Swedish public health official and researcher. He has dispensed medical aid on the ground in some of the neediest and most dangerous places on the globe and he has rigorously sifted through world health and social statistics. He concludes that humans are undergoing a breathtaking transformation in which global hunger, disease, poverty, ignorance, and lawlessness are rapidly declining. The human race is safer, better fed, and healthier than ever before and trending toward improvement, not decline. These are trends that no single nation can change.

But Rosling’s observations are not the only reason I am optimistic. The world we live in today is much different than the milieu that made life perilous in the past. I find myself a more tolerant and better person than I was fifty years ago. I see better people around me. We are all better.

The library conference filled me with hope. I heard over and over that race is behind us, the folks at the conference, to a person, thought that fear and discrimination by race was irrelevant, stupid. I heard over and over that the old patriarchalism that placed males on a pedestal was just passé. Gender, sex, the weird old ways of structuring society are stupid, boring, a waste of everyone’s time.

Libraries and librarians are on the leading edge of a new society, and a very fine edge it is. I am so glad to have a part in the new way.

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Digging Potatoes

I saw a truck load of potatoes in a hopper truck pass through Ferndale yesterday. Somebody must be digging potatoes. From my fleeting view, the potatoes looked good—not too large, uniform size, smooth, clean. U.S. No. 1s, washed and graded in the field and ready for the warehouse. That’s not the way it was done on Waschke Road.

Potatoes on Waschke Road

My grandpa, Gus, was called the Potato King of Whatcom County in Roth’s History of Whatcom County in the 1920s. I don’t know much about the way he raised potatoes in those days, but I have good memories of my dad, Ted, and Grandpa raising potatoes in the 50s and 60s while I was growing up. Like many things on the homestead, planting and digging potatoes was a community event.

Planting

Planting in the spring began with preparing the seed potatoes. Grandpa would choose the best-looking potatoes to set aside for seed for next year. When Grandpa quit selecting the seed, Dad switched to buying certified seed potatoes—White Rose, Netted Gems, and Kennebecs as I remember.

There is an art to cutting seed potatoes. Sprouts start from potato eyes. A whole potato usually has many more eyes than needed for planting, so cutting seed potatoes can double or triple the yield from a sack of seed. Grandpa liked three to five eyes per potato piece planted. Dad, Grandpa, and sometimes my mother, would cut potatoes for several days in late winter getting ready for planting. To speed the work, Grandpa built two “seed cutters,” hoppers with slanted floors he filled with whole seed potatoes. The potatoes exited through an adjustable door that controlled the rate they rolled out onto a tray, which had a fixed vertical knife to slice the potatoes into chunks with the right number of eyes. The chunks fell into a sack and were dusted with sulfur, ready for the potato planter. The knives were kept sharp and I remember cutting myself badly on one when I tried my hand at cutting.

We had a two-row potato planter that required three men to operate. A tractor or team of horses pulled the planter. A set of disks opened trenches into which seed potato chunks dropped. My dad drove the tractor. Two men riding on seats behind the planter regulated the flow of potatoes into the trenches. Sometimes, when help from neighbors was short, my cousin Dave and I got to ride the planter and distribute the falling potatoes, a job that required more concentration and dexterity than you might expect. Another set of disks closed the trenches. It took a full day to plant five or ten acres of potatoes. We planted potatoes in early spring and more often than not, finished planting in the rain.

Dad cultivated the potato field several times during the growing season. The rows were spaced so he could drive the cultivator between the rows and eliminate weeds.

Digging

I looked forward to potato digging in the fall. Dad and Grandpa said that potatoes grew best near the woods, maybe because potatoes prefer acid soil, which meant bright fall leaves, especially the bigleaf maples, were always close in the background. The weather was cool enough for jackets and the air was moist with the fall scent of ripe oat and wheat fields and fruit orchards.

We had a single row potato digger that was pulled by the tractor. The digger was a blade that sliced a foot or so into the ground under the potatoes and vines. The potatoes, vines, and dirt went onto a wide chain belt that shook the dirt off and deposited the potatoes on top of the ground behind the digger. Our digger started out as a horse-drawn implement with a seat for driving the horses. When the potato vines were heavy, someone got to sit on the seat above the chain belt and use their feet to push the dry potato vines along and out the back of the digger. That job often went to a kid with legs long enough to push the vines, usually me or one of my cousins. That job was easy and fun.

The rest of the crew of relatives and neighbors “cleared vines” and “picked potatoes.” The vine clearers threw the vines to the side with pitch forks and the pickers followed, dragging burlap sacks between their legs, and tossing in the potatoes. The star pickers had heavy belts with hooks for the sacks so they could pick with both hands. When a sack was full, the picker would stand it up and grab a new sack from a pile of empties on the flatbed hay wagon.

While my Dad operated the digger, one of the neighbor’s tractors would pull a hay wagon through the field and the men would load on the sacks of freshly picked potatoes. When the wagon was filled, we’d haul it to the house and roll the potatoes down chutes through the basement windows where the potatoes would rest until they were graded and sold on “the route,” Dad and Grandpa’s weekly trip with the pickup truck to a string of small grocery stores and homes in Bellingham. In big crop years, the potatoes that would not fit in the house basement were stored in pits dug into the ground in protected spots in the woods. They lined the pits with cedar rails and straw, then covered the pits with dirt so the potatoes would not freeze.

Grading and selling

Grandpa and Dad sold Washington Combination 75% U.S. No. 1s on the route. As I understood it, we only sold U.S. No. 1 potatoes, but by calling them Combination 75% No. 1, we did not have to pay to have the spuds inspected. We might have gotten more for 100% No. 1s, but not enough to make up for the inspection fee. In any case, Waschke potatoes had a good reputation; the grocers on the route paid Dad and Grandpa a good price no matter what the grade. They also sold potatoes and eggs to Pete Vike, a purchasing agent, who provisioned the galleys of freighters that docked in Bellingham Bay in the 1950s.

Most of the potatoes were stored in the basement of the house. Grandpa and Dad did the grading. A No. 1 potato is smooth and evenly shaped, not small, has no knobs, rough spots, or scabs, and, above all, is not hollow. Large potatoes often have an inner chamber lined with skin. I don’t know why this is a defect. I like baked potato skin and an extra skin on the inside sounds to me like an improvement, but, no matter, a hollow potato was a cull. Any potato large enough to risk being hollow, Dad and Grandpa fed to the animals.

The potato grader was a chute, about thirty inches wide and six feet long built by my grandpa that sat in the basement. The bottom was slats and it was inclined downward at about a 20 degree angle. Potatoes were dumped onto the high end of the grader and they rolled downwards, dirt falling off through the slats. Dad and Grandpa would inspect the potatoes as they rolled downwards and toss any culls that didn’t make the grade into a bushel basket destined to the cows or the pigs. Potatoes that made it all the way to the lower end of the grader went into a burlap sack. When the sack was about filled, it was shifted onto the scales and was filled to exactly one hundred pounds for sale on the route.

This all sounds like a lot of hard, boring, manual labor. I suppose it was, but it didn’t feel that way. The crew of relatives, friends, and neighbors were on a mission. Not a dollar changed hands for the work of in the potato fields. Those who helped got potatoes on their dinner tables, help with haying, cow dehorning, a share in the offal at butchering time– help whenever they needed it. That’s the way it worked on Waschke Road.