Working on a potato future for the Mon-Dak region

Chuck Stadick doesn’t want to predict the agricultural future of the Mon-Dak region — the northwest North Dakota and northeast Montana region.

“No, we want to make the future,” says Stadick, who is one of the key experts the area has been counting on to help move the region’s potato industry into a new age of prosperity.

Stadick is one of a handful of leaders in this corner of the world who are pushing opportunities toward niche markets in potato products as the future for the region’s ability to attract a processing company.

If anybody knows how that can happen, Stadick probably does.

He started with J.R. Simplot Co. in 1977. He became the company’s raw procurement director. He came to Williston, N.D., in 1989 when the area company was looking for a new plant. The so-called Mon-Dak area, along the Montana and North Dakota border came in a “close second” to Portage la Prairie in Manitoba.

At the time, the Canadian currency exchange rate was very favorable, so Simplot built its plant there in the early 1990s. At the time Stadick disagreed with the decision to put the plant in Canada, because he “didn’t think the accountants at that time could guarantee the company, long-term that the exchange rate would remain favorable. Obviously it hadn’t.”

In retrospect it would have been wise to put the plant in the Williston area, Stadick thinks, not only because of the better quality control but because of intervening currency changes and fewer complications in product movement.

“It’s easy to buy and ship potatoes from Canada into the United States, but it’s a lot tougher to go back across the border to Canada from the United States,” he says.