“We’re taking it one day at a time,” Paul Dolan of Associated Potato Growers Inc. said of the Red River Valley potato business. Another day might see improvement over mid-November challenges facing Associated and its competitors.

Associated Potato Growers, which is located in Grand Forks, ND, has three wash plants grading and packing. Demand “is a little sluggish,” he said. “Trucks are a little tight because it’s deer hunting season” and some locally based truckers prefer to hunt rather than drive. Minnesota’s turkey farms this year have endured a bout of turkey flu, which reduced that shipping volume, helping truck availability for northern potato shippers.

“We have lots of potatoes and it’s a big crop,” Dolan said.

The shipped volume won’t be as high as the large harvest numbers initially indicated. In the grading process, “shrink is higher than it has been,” he said. “There are a lot of growth cracks in the potatoes that came from the earlier harvest because of bruising.”

Early in the harvest season, it was dry and thus the ground was hard, damaging the red potatoes as they came out of the earth.

“After we had some rain, it got better,” said Dolan. Still, “We have 20 percent or higher shrink. That cuts into a big crop a little bit. That’s 5 or 6 percent above average in shrink. For this time of year, it’s 10 percent above average. Some lots are as high as 30 percent shrink. We average about 20 to 22 percent this year.”

Dolan noted that after pack out, the red potatoes being shipped are of high quality and the color and size profile are good.

While the region’s red potatoes are showing cracking, the area’s yellow and chipping potatoes have generally not been so afflicted.

Prices for No. 1 A’s are $10-11 per hundredweight, f.o.b. “The B market is much better, with B sizes on Nov. 10 in the low to mid-$20s,” he said.

Dolan said he expected improvement “this fall as the market season goes along. The pressure for shipping as they come out of the field will be gone.”

Associated Potato had one grower with about 65 acres remaining to be harvested in mid-November. The lowest temperatures in the Red River Valley had reached the low 30s so there was frost, “but it has not affected the crop to this point. If we have a couple of sunny days, we’ll be done” with the harvest.

Dolan said that eastern Quebec potato growers were “a thorn in our side by shipping into eastern states and taking away our market. Pretty soon that quality will disappear — or the volume — so they don’t need to ship so many” to the U.S. “Canada can ship all they want here but for us to ship there is a different story.” He added that the value of the Canadian market is also affecting the market somewhat.

Headed toward the winter months, “hopefully demand will pick up and the markets will pick up so the growers can have more money in their pockets,” he noted.

Dolan added that the red potatoes “are keeping well in storage and we will have a full shipping season.”