MERRILL, Ore. — On Friday morning Martin Aguirre drove a tractor hauling a Grimme across a field near the Wong Potatoes packing house. The machine dug just beneath the ground, pulling out Amarosa fingerling potatoes, shaking off the dirt and placing them in a bin.
Aguirre was finishing one of the last fields of the 2015 harvest, which Wong Potatoes wrapped up on Friday, almost three weeks ahead of the average year.
“Today will be our last day of digging potatoes. And normally we don’t do that until just before Thanksgiving,” said Ken Rutledge, sales manager with Wong Potatoes. “Now is the time we’d normally be getting started, and now we’re almost done.”
A warm winter, warm spring and hot summer accelerated the timeline for spuds this year in the Klamath Basin.
“Everything went in the ground a lot earlier,” Rutledge said. “Consequently, it’s all getting out of the ground earlier.”
“It’s just the season,” said Dan Chin, owner of Wong Potatoes. “It was warmer in the spring. The summer was warm.”
After a winter with little snow and that warm spring, Chin said the availability of water for irrigation was an unknown back in April.
“Zero water means almost zero potatoes. Pretty challenging for us when we’ve got customers that want potatoes,” Chin said. “If we don’t have any potatoes, no jobs. It’s huge for us. Huge for them.”
The water did come through, and because the harvest is happening and ending early, Wong Potatoes will be done before the end of the irrigation season.
Chin called the 2015 harvest “average,” but noted some spuds did better in the hot summer than others.
“We’re pretty pleased with the quality of the crop this year,” Chin said. “It’s good.”
This summer had about two weeks of heat above 90 degrees. Hot for potatoes, Chin said.
In some cases that caused the potatoes to grow faster, or “blow up,” Rutledge said. Workers had to keep monitoring the spuds to make sure they didn’t grow too fast or get too large.
On Friday, Aguirre harvested the Amarosa fingerlings. The potatoes are small and long. Wong Potatoes produces them for the organic market, but Friday’s field was for the conventional, non-organic market.
Many of Wong Potatoes’ 100 employees stay for years and years because the work is year-round or nearly year-round, Rutledge said.
