French fries are the lifeblood of fast food joints like McDonald’s. They are easy to make and even easier to eat.
More importantly, French fries are a great way to make a pretty penny in the restaurant industry. Did you know McDonald’s profit margin for fries is between 75 and 90 percent?
In comparison, the profit margin for the company’s beefy double cheeseburger is only 55 percent on the high end.
French fries are golden, both in colour and in profit. It’s no wonder then that business is booming for our province’s potato industry. Whether it’s sports or innovation, Albertans like to be first.
That can-do attitude applies to potato farming, too. Alberta surpassed Prince Edward Island (PEI) as Canada’s largest potato-producing province last year for the second time this century.
Our spud-loving farmers produced over 32 million hundredweight (CWT) potatoes this year compared to PEI’s almost 26 million CWT potatoes.
“The industry is starting to shift, and it’s not just Alberta. Manitoba is growing. Washington is growing. Idaho continues to grow. The production is starting to shift from the east to the west,” Terence Hochstein, executive director of the Potato Growers of Alberta, told CBC News.
Our potato farmers are showers and growers, planting over 80,000 acres of potatoes this year, up from last year’s total of a little over 73,000 acres.
Alberta’s love for spud has caught the eye of investors looking to capitalize on our province’s potato industry.
In March last year, McCain Foods Ltd. announced that it would spend $600 million to double the size of its potato processing facility in Coaldale, a town in southern Alberta.
Potatoes aren’t just rich in Vitamin C. They are also packed with dollars and cents. Alberta’s potato industry is valued at almost $2.9 billion, according to a 2022 study by Potato Growers of Alberta.
The industry might be profitable, but that doesn’t mean potato farming is easy. Alberta farmers work tirelessly to overcome obstacles like pests, water scarcity, and labour shortages, to name just a few.
Tilling the Way Forward
A warming global climate is having a devastating impact on farmers in southern Alberta and province-wide.
Record-breaking high temperatures, a lack of rain, and reservoirs evaporating resulted in more than 30 water shortage advisories across the province last year.
In 2023, the province stated that most of Alberta’s agricultural areas were running moisture deficits extending back at least three years.
However, some potato farmers managed to both survive and thrive, like Alison Davie, owner of North Paddock Farms in Taber, a town in southern Alberta about 50 kilometres east of Lethbridge, our province’s ‘Happiest City.’
Despite hot and dry conditions, Davie claims her yield was “above average” last year thanks to irrigation districts.
There are 11 irrigation districts in Alberta providing water to over 1.5 million acres of land, most of which is agricultural land. In 2009, agrarian irrigation accounted for over 40 percent of water allocations.
“We’re mostly in the St. Mary River Irrigation District. We had our water cut back quite a lot. You just have to roll with it, and whatever Mother Nature deals us, you just have to make the best of it,” Davie told CBC News.
Davie is happy tending to tubers in Taber, but she hopes more young people will get involved in the industry. Unfortunately, most young people dream of big-city jobs, not back-breaking farm labour.
“Older workers, as we see across the board in all sectors, are leaving the workforce, and there’s not as many younger workers to replace them,” Shannon Sereda, director of government relations, policy, and markets for Alberta Grains, told Lakeland Today.
Potato farmers are a bit of an outlier. The average age of potato farmers in Alberta is 48 years old, which is almost a decade younger than the average age of farmers in our province.
Hochstein is optimistic about the future of potato farming in Alberta, and he has good reason to be.
However, just because farmers like Davie were able to weather the effects of our climate crisis doesn’t mean she or other farmers will be able to do so next year or the year after that.
