The Small Farm Future Blog

In praise of potatoes

Posted on January 1, 2012 | 3 Comments

Having recently put away several festive meals which varied in all respects save the ubiquitous roast potato, I thought the time was right to pen something about this stalwart vegetable.

The potato always seems to play second fiddle to wheat. UK farmers devote 42% of cropped land to wheat, and only 3% to potatoes – even if, scandalously, around 47% of the wheat is fed to livestock (the stats are here). Potatoes also seem to come off second best in the alternative farming movement. William Cobbett, the founding father of English agricultural radicalism, wrote in Cottage Economy (1822) that the potato was “the root…of slovenliness, filth, misery and slavery”, its cultivation bringing “English labourers down to the state of the Irish, whose mode of living, as to food, is but one remove from that of the pig.” John Seymour, self-sufficiency guru of the 1970s talked sniffily of ‘inferior’ potato-based cultures, and even Simon Fairlie in Meat, his superb recent book on sustainable small-scale farming, focuses largely on grass and cereal farming, describing vegetables (presumably including potatoes) as ‘secondary and niche commodities’.

I must admit there’s a romance to wheat that potatoes lack. When I’ve grown wheat I’ve felt a connection going back through the ages of European farming tradition to its origins in the domestication of cereals in the Near East, which is not something I can say when I dig knobbly old potatoes out of the ground (Andean farmers may take a different view). But romance isn’t the point of farming, or not its main point anyway (much after all can be said in favour of small-scale farming beyond the merely practical). Farming is, or at least ought to be, about feeding people, and in this respect potatoes fit the bill.

For the fact is that Cobbett was wrong. It’s not that potatoes make paupers, but that paupers grow potatoes, because in the UK you can get more nutrition out of a given area of land by growing potatoes than by growing anything else (UK farmers currently produce 40% more calories and 5% more protein for each hectare of potatoes they grow than a corresponding hectare of wheat) – it’s even been argued that the adoption of potato cultivation in Europe saved it from subsistence crises. Hopefully, we’ll never again see the level of pauperisation that led to the potato monocropping of Cobbett’s day, but it’s likely that in the future we’ll have to think a lot more carefully about the gross productivity of agricultural land in order to feed human populations sustainably, and I suspect that potatoes will have a crucial role here.

All crops have their pros and cons, of course. On arable scales, potatoes require heavy tillage and heavy fertilisation, both of which eat up energy. They’re also a thirsty crop, they don’t store and travel with the economy of seed crops like wheat and they become a nuisance when they return as volunteer weeds in subsequent crops. But on market garden scales most of these problems diminish, or even turn into advantages. With intensive organic horticultural rotations, heavy tillage after a fertility-building cover crop followed by potatoes provides good tilth, weed control and a diminishing fertility gradient, all of which can benefit the succeeding crops. And though the greater transportability of seed crops is an advantage in some respects, it’s a disadvantage when this very mobility is used directly or indirectly as a political weapon to undermine local agricultures and agricultural independence – as has often been the case with US food aid and EU food dumping. For those of us who believe that social benefit is optimised in more self-reliant and localised economies there’s a lot to be said for shifting the emphasis away from the grain-based agricultures fuelling international commodity trading and towards a more local potato-based horticulture (I’ll say more in another post about exactly how self-reliant and local we should be aiming for). The fact that many of the major grain-exporting regions of the world are threatened by increasing aridity, salinity and soil loss is another factor weighing in favour of a local potato economy.

From a small-scale grower’s perspective, potatoes are a difficult crop because it’s hard to compete economically with large arable producers in the present economic circumstances (ie. cheap fuel and expensive labour). But I’m determined to walk my talk by giving small-scale potato growing a go over the next couple of years, using lightly-mechanised methods. My research to date has shown that this is a more energy-efficient way of farming in terms of food energy return on fossil energy input, and I suspect that this question of energy return on energy invested – currently of little mainstream agronomic interest – will loom increasingly large in future years.

So happy new year to everyone. The perfect time to get the potato catalogues out – the planting season is only a couple of months away!