Florida is arguably the most tourism-centric state in the union, but if you can manage to get off the beaches and out of the resorts (indeed, a difficult task), it’s difficult not to wonder at the strange beauty and history of the place. Ibises, egrets and sandhill cranes are constantly gliding by overhead, and the locals say they barely blink at a gator in the road. Even cruising down the interstate—passing exits for places with names like Thonotosassa, Myakka City and Loxahatchee—you have to wonder what it must have been like to tromp through the swamps and woods back in Osceola’s day.
The fact is, even potatoes have a long and illustrious history in the Sunshine State, with the first commercial farms supplying local resorts as far back as the 1880s, when Thomas Hastings made a name for himself with his Prairie Garden Farm. It was there, near the northeastern Florida town named for Hastings, that Alan Jones came up in the potato industry.
Jones’s father and uncle were the first growers in the Hastings area to contract with Frito-Lay some 50 years ago, a business move that is still paying dividends today. That operation was divided in the 1980s, and in 1987 Alan Jones headed south to start his own farm in Parrish, Fla., near Tampa Bay, leaving a brother to run the home farm in Hastings. Today, Jones Potato Farm grows some 2,000 acres of potatoes each year for the fresh and chip markets. Jones also produces green beans and citrus fruits and runs a small cow/calf operation.
“I’m one of the only growers in the state who has both a table and a chip operation,” Jones says. “So I’m growing about 12 different varieties of potatoes.”
Growing so many varieties means that Jones is almost always either planting or harvesting potatoes—planting runs from Oc tober through mid-January, and harvest time begins in February and lasts through early May. While growers in the northern climes may envy Jones’s ability to grow through the winter months, he points out that there are challenges involved too.
“It’s just too wet to do much more than a cover crop in the summer, which is hurricane season,” he says. “What we fight down here is the white sands and growing through the shortest days of the year. It’s tough to overtake the yields of Idaho or the [Red River] Valley when you’ve only got eight or 10 hours of sunlight a day.”
But Jones acknowledges the blessings of farming in Florida, and he’s worked hard to improve his operation each year. In 2013 he was honored by the Fertilizer Institute with the institute’s Stewardship Award for the Southeast region for converting from seepage to pivot irrigation, a move that Jones says conserves over 1 million gallons of water per day compared to historical water use numbers for potato production. “Irrigation here just depends,” he says. “This sand down here soaks water up nicely, but it doesn’t hold water for very long. There have been times where we haven’t had a drop of rain during the whole potato season. Fertility programs have to be able to adapt to weather situations. You need to put a base plan together, but you’ve got to be willing to change it when weather impacts your crop.”
Each of Jones’s three teenaged children have spent considerable time working on the farm, and whether they come back to the farm as adults or not, Jones knows the experience has been good for the family. “The best thing I feel I can give my family is my time, for one, and No. 2 is an opportunity,” he says. “What they do with those things is going to be their prerogative. It’s a great way to make a living. I won’t say we’re going to get rich, but we make a good living—not to mention being able to work with all the great people in the potato industry.”
Jones knows that that opportunity is important not only for his family, but for his employees as well. He utilizes a profit-sharing plan in which each team of employees is eligible for performance bonuses based on achievement in areas ranging from equipment to yields. “It’s a real team effort here,” he says. “We’ve got so much money invested in the infrastructure of a large farm, it takes a team to keep it all together. We all have to be held responsible and accountable.”
In the end, Jones believes his success comes down to having the faith to reinvest in his own operation and in constantly trying to learn and improve. “Everything we do, it’s all learned behavior,” he says. “What’s all that knowledge worth? I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that I have a head full of it.”