Potato farming innovations on display at Spudnik company open house

BLACKFOOT, Idaho (KIFI) - Innovations in potato farming equipment are being made at Spudnik in Blackfoot, Idaho. With a shrinking labor force, the right tools for the job mean everything.

"Some of these farms now are harvesting, you know, 80, 9000 thousand sacks a day," Spudnik regional sales manager Brent Rigby said. "You've got to run that amount of product over both the harvester and your cleaning and your pilots. That's why the size is getting bigger all the time to handle that volume."

More than 12 million pounds of steel come through the factory each year where it's cut, welded and assembled into planting and harvesting equipment.

Each innovation is designed to increase farming yield in a small window of opportunity.

"What you're looking at in the potato industry is when we start in the spring, we have a window that we can play. In that window, we need to be very careful that we hit both soil temperatures and also growing degree days so that we can get the best truck that we so we get the yield and the quality that we need," Rigby said. "A lot of times, as these farms have got bigger, we're trying to do more acres with less equipment. But, we still have got to get across to the time time-frame."

Depending on their soil, farmers have to choose which planter or harvester works best for them. For example, Spudnik designs harvesters to sort rocks from potatoes for sandy rocky soils like California or planters to increase yield for Idaho soil.

And that's not all they're working on. Spudnik is also designing a self-propelling Harvester.

"We started designing it over a year and a half ago and we started putting it together. Our goal is, is that we'll get it down into Arizona about May time so that we can put it in the field and start digging with it," Rigby said.

Farmers can see Spudnik's innovations at the company open house on Tuesday, Jan. 17, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.