AMERICAN FALLS, Idaho — Order french fries at any Chick-fil-A in America, and there’s a good chance they started in this corner of southeast Idaho. The restaurant chain buys most of its frozen fries from Idaho-based Lamb Weston, whose motto is “Possibilities in Potatoes.”
But a host of challenges — droughts, heat waves, pesticide-resistant insects and surging production from foreign competitors — confronts farmers and companies alike in the heart of U.S. potato production. Potato farmers planted around 15,000 fewer acres in Idaho this year due to drought and low prices, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Growers like Kamren Koompin, whose family has grown potatoes in American Falls for decades, are counting on scientific advances and a helping hand from the federal government to ride out natural disasters amid competition from China and other countries. At the same time, they are worried about the Trump administration’s embrace of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement — which often focuses on ultra-processed food — may turn consumers against potato chips, a key product made from their crops.
“What happens in Idaho can affect the potato market in the whole country,” said Koompin, who sells to Lamb Weston. A third of the country’s potatoes come from Idaho, so bad weather or plant disease outbreaks in the state can eventually sting consumers nationwide whether they’re buying bags of potatoes or ordering french fries out.
Growers’ concerns are playing out as Congress weighs the farm bill, the legislation outlining programs at the Department of Agriculture. Normally it’s passed about every five years, but Congress has struggled to enact one since the 2018 farm bill expired in 2023, opting for short extensions while negotiations continue. Lawmakers say they’ll try to hammer out a compromise before their summer recess ends in mid-September.
The National Potato Council, a lobbying group for growers, is asking Congress and the Trump administration to use the farm bill to boost research and allow farmers to keep using common pesticides. The organization’s board of directors, which includes Koompin, also worries about upholding the potato’s public image against the MAHA movement.
Kam Quarles, CEO of the council, wants to be sure the Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t deem potato chips and similar products as ultra-processed when they’re not much more than potatoes, oil and salt.
“You can make that in your kitchen,” Quarles said. “We want to be sure the federal government is informing consumers in a beneficial way.”
The MAHA movement and many dieticians say potato chips are a mixed bag, with flavored varieties and those made from dehydrated potatoes leaning more toward the ultra-processed side.
Potato chips occupy a middle ground in the MAHA debate that the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t firmly defined. The movement, inspired by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., takes a dim view of the seed oils like canola or sunflower typically used to make them, as well as the dehydrated potatoes used in some products. The resulting nutrition guidelines from the Trump administration, released in January, urge a move away from “chips” without being more specific.
“Whether potato products are ultra-processed or not depends on the ingredients and manufacturing methods used,” said Fang Fang Zhang, a cancer epidemiologist at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, also known as the Food is Medicine Institute.
“Plain potato chips made from only potatoes, oil and salt are not considered as ultra-processed,” Zhang said, “but Pringles and other reconstituted potato crisps are classified as ultra-processed because they are made from dehydrated potato flakes, starches, emulsifiers and other industrial ingredients that are formed into a uniform product.”
The food activist Vani Hari, who blogs as “Food Babe,” has a broader definition, saying, “All mass produced potato chips made with industrial seed oils should be considered ultra-processed. The ones you make at home with olive oil are not.”
Too many potatoes
In some ways, potatoes in Idaho are a victim of their own success; the region is so productive that there’s been a glut of potatoes, helping to depress prices at the same time growers face higher costs for everything from fertilizer to electricity to run the irrigation pumps to equipment.
“Over the last six years, we’ve seen feast and famine,” Koompin said on a truck ride around the farm, adding that record high and record low prices have each occurred during that time. Farmers were so productive last year, Koompin said, “you couldn’t give a potato away. A lot went to cattle feed.”
The prices farmers receive for potatoes — largely through annual contracts with big suppliers like Lamb Weston or McCain Foods — doesn’t always match up with what consumers pay. While farmers have seen low prices for potatoes, prices for frozen potato products like fries have shot up in the last decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Farmers who sell fresh potatoes on the open market, where they don’t have annual contracts to protect them, have been hurting, said Patrick Hatzenbuehler, an agricultural economist with the University of Idaho. Buyers facing higher transportation or labor costs also have an incentive to pay growers less.
“The producer, unfortunately, gets kind of hit with those things that are difficult to control on their end,” Hatzenbuehler said.
‘Great for growing’
Despite the challenges, Idaho has advantages over other states, including cold winters and sunny, dry summers that hold down plant diseases and insect pests and make long-term storage with refrigeration relatively easy, Koompin said as he checked the crop’s progress on a 95-degree day.
“That’s part of what makes Idaho great for growing,” Koompin said. “Typically we’re just like a giant greenhouse. And the humidity, most of the time it’s pretty low.”
The region’s connection with the crop is so storied, there’s an Idaho Potato Museum in neighboring Blackfoot, where displays include the biggest specimen the state has grown, a bronzed, 7-pound, 2-ounce heavyweight that’s a foot long, harvested in 2018. There are two display cases of Mr. Potato Head toys, and a café serving potato soup and several types of french fries.
Koompin’s potato crop covers about 2,500 acres of flat land in the Snake River Valley. The farm, or a series of farms, grows mainly russet-type potatoes, although the Koompins and other growers branch out into crops like corn and wheat to feed the state’s growing dairy herd as well. Idaho is home to the country’s biggest yogurt plant, a Chobani facility in Idaho Falls.
As the summer heat built one day, Koompin walked into the knee-high rows of green leaves that mark the potatoes growing in the soil and plunged a shovel into the ground. The volcanic soil is a rich, dark brown and crumbles like chocolate cake — not too dry, and not too wet. Even on a hot day, the shade from the plants keeps the ground cool to the touch.
The light brown potatoes, about the size of kiwis by mid-July, will be ready for harvest by mid- to late September, Koompin said.
A typical potato plant has two or three stems and produces anywhere from eight to 20 potatoes. To the big buyers making long french fries — McCain and Lamb Weston are some of the biggest — a potato’s dimensions are as important as its weight. Farmers’ contracts with buyers spell it out through payments, Koompin said.
“You don’t want a 6-ounce potato that’s round,” Koompin said.
Although Lamb Weston considers Idaho and the Pacific Northwest “one of the best places on Earth to grow potatoes,” the company doesn’t rely exclusively on the region, said a spokesperson, Alyssa Townsend.
“Lamb Weston sources its potatoes through a mix of corporately managed farms, partnerships with growers in key regions, and open market purchases around the globe, helping reduce reliance on any single geography,” the company said in statement. “Combined with strong grower relationships and proactive crop planning, this diversified approach helps manage supply risks while maintaining a reliable supply of potatoes for our customers.”
Water woes
Idaho has another advantage that’s also a potential liability: irrigation.
To produce the right potato in Idaho, a grower needs the kind of steady water that only irrigation can produce. But scant rainfall and declining aquifers raise long-term questions about how much water will be available. Gov. Brad Little, a Republican, declared a drought emergency in April, citing the scarce snowmelt from last winter.
In nearby Aberdeen, William Toevs said he’s starting to think about the long-term prospects for water. Growers have moved away from methods like flood irrigation to more efficient overhead sprinklers.
“As long as we have water in the canal, we’re OK, but that’s an issue,” Toevs said. “In the last 10 years we’ve been a lot more conscious of aquifer levels.”
Ultimately, Toevs said, new varieties of potatoes will demand less water and produce greater yields.
The Clearwater Russet, developed by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, came on the scene in the early 2000s. A more recent arrival is the Rainier Russet, a disease-resistant type that placed first for two years in a row for the Oregon Potato Commission Goodness Unearthed Best Potato Award.
With such advances, Toevs said, “We won’t need the acres in Idaho that we used to.”
A little less reliance on irrigation can help in still other ways. Irrigation comes with a price. All that water can breed plant diseases, from white mold to gray mold to early blight or, the most famous disease, late blight, which caused the Irish Potato Famine from 1845 to 1852.
Farmers fight all of them with fungicides, which are registered and regulated by EPA through the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. The law also governs insecticides growers use to fight off potato beetles, which thrive in hot weather, are developing resistance to some chemicals and may become a bigger problem with the changing climate, according to researchers at Michigan State University.
The amount of chemicals used on potatoes alarms environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity, which say U.S. agriculture overall is too dependent on pesticides.
Around 90 percent of potatoes grown in the U.S. are treated with fungicides, herbicides and pesticides, making it one of the “dirty” crops identified by the organization, said CBD Environmental Health Science Director Nathan Donley. Many are sprayed with chlorothalonil, a fungicide EPA deems a probable carcinogen and which is banned in Europe, Donley said.
“Overall, about 10 million pounds of pesticides are used on potatoes every year, which is a heck of a lot of chemicals for a crop grown on less than a million total acres in the U.S.,” Donley said.
Crop protection is crucial for potatoes, which can quickly succumb, said Quarles, at the Potato Council.
“If you get a pest or disease outbreak, it’s like turning out a light,” Quarles said. “The hammer comes down pretty quickly.”
