Seed Potato Quality
Our commercial potato farmers must be incredibly picky about what they receive and plant. Quality seed potatoes are paramount to growing a quality little potato.
Growing Seed Potatoes
We have inspection agents visit the field twice a year to ensure our seed potato quality. The agent physically walks through the fields and inspects the plants to ensure they’re healthy and without disease.
Soil Composition
Soft, mellow soil is ideal for potato planting. Farmers look for the perfect balance of clay, silt, and sand in their soil to ensure it can easily form little hills for planting. We work closely with our farmers to find the best soil composition for each one of our varieties to give them their best chance to thrive.
Keeping the Soil Safe
Planting potatoes in little hills formed in the soil protects them from sun burn, frost, and water damage. Farmers will sometimes plant cover crops like fall rye after harvest to help prevent soil erosion.
Growing Season
Once a week during the growing season our farmers walk every field, hand inspecting their plants to make sure they’re healthy, and removing any that don’t meet expectations.
Potato Storage
After harvesting and while they’re waiting their turn to be shipped to our packaging facility, we put our Little Potatoes to sleep in a cool and humid place to keep them fresh. That way we can keep our potatoes comfy and undisturbed until they make their way to be packaged.
Quality Starts in the Field
Crop Rotation
Potatoes are only grown once every few years per field, with other crops filling the years in between. This ensures the soil is constantly being replenished with different nutrients. Rotating with legumes is common because they help take nitrogen out of the air and infuse it back into the soil. Rotating crops helps to bring different rooting patterns into the soil, breaking it up and allowing different microbial growth. Everything we do in the field is in pursuit of creating the best possible environment for our little potatoes to grow in.
See our Sustainability Commitments
Developing Little Potato Varieties
Variety development does so much to manage the little details about how each little potato best grows before we hand it over to our farmers. We then work with them throughout the growing season to keep innovating, learning, and improving the process to ensure the highest quality and most sustainably grown potato for you. Everything we do is with you in mind—we want to grow the creamiest, most delicious little potatoes you’ve ever tasted, in the way that responsibly uses the land it grows in.
Meet our Farmers
