The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) recently announced a USD50m surplus commodities purchase for potatoes. The declaration came in response to a request made by the National Potato Council on behalf of the Washington State Potato Commission and the Idaho Potato Commission.

“We thank Secretary Vilsack and the entire team at AMS for taking this request so seriously as evidenced by the resources committed in their announcement. We also appreciate the work of Randy Russell and his team at The Russell Group for their strategic counsel on making this occur. Additionally, the industry thanks Mark Klompien, President and CEO of United Potato Growers of America, for providing excellent data on the current and future economics that made a compelling case to USDA to justify this unusual but necessary step to temporarily assist impacted growers,” Dean Gibson, NPC Vice President of Legislative Affairs, mentioned.

During the NPC Washington Summit in February, the leaders of both the Washington State Potato Commission and the Idaho Potato Commission asked the NPC to take the unusual step of requesting USDA to use its surplus commodity purchasing (Section 32) authority to deal with a significant oversupply of potatoes from the 2023 growing season.

After two months of discussions with all the state potato organizations to ensure no objections, NPC’s request was made via a letter to USDA on April 25.

Noting that the current oversupply could potentially harm growers for multiple years, NPC’s letter stated, “After numerous meetings with officials representing the major U.S. production areas, the industry has determined that a surplus commodity purchase of $50 million would provide some relief.”