MERRILL, Ore. — On Friday morning, Martin Aguirre drove a tractor hauling a Grimme potato harvester across a field near the Wong Potatoes packing house. The machine dug just beneath the ground, pulling out AmaRosa fingerlings, shaking off the dirt and depositing them in a bin.
Aguirre was finishing one of the last fields of the 2015 harvest. Wong Potatoes wrapped up last Friday, nearly three weeks ahead of the average year.
“Today will be our last day of digging potatoes. Normally we don’t do that until just before Thanksgiving,” said Wong Potatoes sales manager Ken Rutledge. “Now is the time we’d normally be getting started, and now we’re almost done."
A warm winter and spring accompanied by a hot summer accelerated the timeline for potatoes this year in Oregon’s Klamath Basin.
“Everything went in the ground a lot earlier,” Rutledge said. “Consequently, it’s all getting out of the ground earlier.”
“It’s just the season,” said Wong Potatoes owner Dan Chin. “It was warmer in the spring; the summer was warm.”
After a winter with little snow and that warm spring, Chin said the availability of water for irrigation was an unknown at the beginning of the growing season in April.
“Zero water means almost zero potatoes,” Chin said. “It’s pretty challenging for us when we’ve got customers who want potatoes. If we don't have any potatoes, [there are] no jobs. It’s huge for us, huge for them.”
The water did come, and because the harvest is happening and ending early, Wong Potatoes will be done before the end of the irrigation season.
Chin called the 2015 harvest “average” but noted some potatoes did better in the hot summer than others.
“We’re pretty pleased with the quality of the crop this year,” Chin said.
This summer saw about two weeks with temperatures above 90 degrees which is pretty hot for potatoes, Chin said.
In some cases that caused the potatoes to grow faster, or “blow up,” Rutledge said. Workers had to keep monitoring the spuds to make sure they didn't grow too fast or get too large.
On Friday Aguirre harvested the AmaRosa fingerlings. Like their name suggests, the potatoes are small and long. Wong Potatoes produces these for the organic market, but the field harvested Friday was for the conventional, non-organic market.
Aguirre took a break from his work and picked some of the red fingerlings up out of the dirt. With a pocketknife, he cut one open to reveal the potato’s pink flesh.
“They’ve got some nice color inside,” Aguirre said.
Rutledge pointed to Aguirre as Wong Potatoes’ jack-of-all-trades.
“A lot of the guys who work here do many, many different jobs,” Rutledge said. “Everything from putting these pipes together, working on the pumps, the motor to run it, to running equipment, to planting. This guy works year-round.”
Many of Wong Potatoes’ 100 employees stay for years because the work is year-round or close to it, Rutledge said. In the packing shed, he pointed to Juan Mendez, who has worked at Wong Potatoes for 44 years.
“If something happens here, he makes it happen,” Rutledge said of Mendez.
“I like it; I like what I’m doing,” Mendez said, adding with a laugh that he liked being able to take potatoes home.
Source: Herald and News