FoodTrust - Connections

Potatoes are, and have almost always been, cheap. Cheap, that is, for consumers to purchase. They are, however, not cheap for farmers to grow.

Low financial returns means that farmers are selling crops for less than what it costs for them to be grown. Small farms are declaring bankruptcy at an alarming rate all over North America because they are not receiving fair value for the crops they grow.

One of FoodTrust’s goals is to help farms to become sustainable. There are three key “pillars” to sustainability – environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and economic growth. Increased financial returns to farmers can help with all three.

John Ikerd has many excellent papers on his web site dealing with sustainability and agriculture.

Scott

I was talking with Colleen the other day and she mentioned that with the new crop being harvested they were starting to get busier with quality control inspections. Colleen is in charge of Quality Control for FoodTrust.

Inspections! What a great idea for a post!

Sherry is off on maternity leave, so Colleen has hired Harvey to help out with inspections. He and Jana will be at the packers almost every day watching the grading lines and making random inspections of the boxes full of fresh P.E.I. potatoes destined for stores in Ontario and Quebec.

It can be a tough job lifting the 50 lb. boxes of potatoes over to the inspection table all day. But Harvey and Jana know it is an important part of the job. Without them some quality issues could slip by and create problems for FoodTrust’s reputation as a supplier of high quality potatoes.

They look at every potato in the box very carefully, scoring them for quality issues. If the quality does not meet our strict specifications the whole box of potatoes go back to the grading line for re-grading. If too many boxes fail they all might have to be re-graded. Fortunately that rarely happens.

Scott

Just for fun here’s a little video I found, inspired by The Lord of the Rings.

Potatoes, used as a cheap and plentiful source of nourishment, haven’t changed much in thousands of year. What can you possibly do to add value to such a basic vegetable?

That was a question we asked ourselves about five years ago. “What can we do to add value to such an inexpensive commodity that will produce greater returns to farmers?” The first thing we did was to ask what you wanted as a potato purchaser.

You told us that you wanted greater convenience. You wanted potatoes that cooked evenly, didn’t require a lot of washing, and you didn’t want to have to sort through a bag to weed out the biggest or smallest, bruised or otherwise bad ones.

You also told us you didn’t really know how to cook potatoes. Sure, you knew you could cook them in boiling water, then either leave them as is or mash them. But, you wanted to know which variety produced the very best mashed potato, or the best baked potato.

You told us you would be willing to pay more for potatoes that met your criteria for THE perfect potato.

So, we went about setting standards that growers and packers could use to make sure your potatoes were consistently sized and free of most defects. We partnered with the Culinary Institute of Canada and spent two years researching which potato varieties were best suited for each cooking method. We changed a regular, everyday, humdrum potato from an unexceptional commodity item into something that would achieve consistent results from one meal to the next.

In the process, we created an opportunity for farmers to increase the income they receive from their crop. Why is that important? Why should you care about how much money a farmer makes? That’s a topic for another post.

Later,

Scott