The Small Farm Future Blog

Of Potatoes and Potato Co-ops

Posted on April 27, 2012 | 1 Comment

I extolled the virtues of potatoes in a recent post, and in this one I’m returning to the issue with a little more hard data (or hard-ish, at any rate) having just completed an analysis of the energy balance, labour inputs and costs of various scales and methods of potato production. The motive behind it was partly to research the possibility of establishing a local potato growing co-op in Frome where I live – if you’re local and potentially interested in this, please have a look at the full document Notes on Forming a Potato Co-op in Frome, (also posted on this site’s Research page), and get back to me with your comments. If there’s sufficient interest, then this may be something that we could take forward locally.

But I think the analysis may be of wider interest and applicability, so if you’re not local but are interested in sustainability and small-scale farming, I’d still appreciate your comments on my analysis and methodology, or on their implications. The data are in the spreadsheet of underlying data accompanying the document. In particular, if you have any experience or knowledge of potato-growing at any scale from back garden to large-scale arable farming I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on my assumptions and the values that I’ve used in the different models. Are the assumptions sound? Are the values entered in the spreadsheet plausible? If you have any other published data or, even better, unpublished data that you’ve collected in the course of your own potato-growing, I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve spent a long time fiddling with the data, agonising over various assumptions, correcting mistakes and so on – I could probably carry on doing so indefinitely, but maybe now is the time to dispatch it into the collective mind of the blogosphere and see what comes back to me.

Just to summarise briefly my findings here, I looked at five different scales/methods of potato production:

• large-scale mechanised ‘conventional’ growing using synthetic agro-chemicals (to feed 2,000+)
• largish-scale mechanised agroecological growing using green manures for fertility (to feed 150+)
• smallish-scale semi-mechanised agroecological growing using green manures  (to feed 15-60)
• domestic scale non-mechanised agroecological growing using green manures (to feed 1-2)
• domestic scale non-mechanised ‘organic’ growing using imported manure (to feed 1-2)

The results suggest that broadly speaking unmechanised domestic-scale production is the most energy efficient, but the energy advantage quickly dwindles if you start trucking in manure or driving to allotments. I conclude that there’s nevertheless a good case for establishing local potato co-ops on the basis of semi-mechanised, small-scale agroecology, or even larger scale agroecological growing at a pinch – but you’ll have to read the report to find out why!

More broadly the analysis shows the trade-off between energy input and labour input with the different scales of production. What sort of farming system do we want – an energy-hungry, labour-light one or a labour-hungry, energy-light one? An advantage of small-scale agroecology is that it may work as a compromise between the two extremes. But I’d be interested in your thoughts – so please post them below…