News on The Potato Supply Chain from Texas

As MountainKing readies for its fall harvest, early tests from its fields in Colorado’s San Luis Valley offer encouraging signs for several of the brand’s gourmet varieties including its yellow-flesh varietals.

All-yellow flesh potatoes continue to rise above russets, reds and whites in the critical metric of retailer volume sales, an encouraging sign for grocers as growers ready for their upcoming fall harvests.

As shoppers stock up for the summer grilling season, new national sales data indicates US sales of fingerlings and smaller-sized gourmet varietal potatoes, both popular for backyard cookouts, remain on a solid, upward ascent.

In light of on-going developments with COVID-19 the organizers of the Potato Expo 2021 have decided to hold the event as a Virtual Experience, entirely online.

Last January we could never have predicted how the year would play out. In light of the impacts of COVID-19, we knew that the Potato Expo had to change.

Black Gold Farms, Grand Forks, N.D., will start the harvest of red potatoes in Texas soon. The company will be harvesting the potatoes for about a month, starting in early May in Pearsall, Texas, according to a news release.

Black Gold Farms started harvest of the 2019 fresh crop of Texas colored potatoes earlier this week. According to the company, the first run fields have indicated that the quality will be better than ever.

John Keeling is The Packer’s 2018 Potato Man for All Seasons.Tom Karst, the editor of The Packer, presented the award at National Potato Council’s annual banquet

Earlier this month Texas A&M held its annual Potato Field Day where it presented a range of new potato varieties.

MountainKing Potatoes, a leading grower of table potatoes in the United States, has started the harvest of its Texas New Crop Reds, one of the company’s top sellers now available for retail grocers.

MountainKing Jumbo Russets are now available for a limited time following an impressive harvest of the company’s large-sized variety.

Dirk Hays,Texas A&M AgriLife Research plant geneticist: “With Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), we can image the size of the tubers and get a correlation to the actual physical size of the potato without harvesting them. Potatoes are a dream for Ground Penetrating Radar.”

The Texas A&M AgriLife Research plant pathology team intentionally infected potato plants with psyllids positive with the bacterium that causes zebra chip disease, in order to identify promising germplasm in the battle against the disease plaguing the US potato industry for the past 15 years.

The potato industry may be losing a mainstay in the battle against psyllids, according to a recent Texas A&M AgriLife Research study.

King Rustics, a new variety of russet potato is back in Walmart stores where its melt-in-your-mouth taste is certain to give a whole new meaning to any wintertime potato dish favorite.

Participants at the 25th annual Texas Potato Breeding and Variety Development Program field day learned that the harvest is underway, that psyllids are threatening unharvested fields and that new varieties are showing lots of promise.

The annual Potato Field Day in the High Plains featuring the Texas A&M University AgriLife Potato Breeding and Variety Development Program will be July 21.

Entomologist Ada Szczepaniec at Texas A&M AgriLife Research is addressing the concern of growing resistance of potato psyllids to the neonicotinoid classification of insecticides.