Year-old Northwest potatoes are being dumped in favor of new potatoes

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
So in order to manage that situation, processors paid for the extra potatoes — but they have growers dispose of them for other uses, like cattle feed and for food banks.

“Some of them have been dumped out in fields and canyons and anywhere else where we can just get rid of them,” Lathim said. “Here we don’t have a hard enough winter to do much of that, so that was very limited on what was happening here. But in Idaho and Alberta, where they have a much harder winter, most of those potatoes did end up going into fallow fields, where they won’t be a problem for diseases and pests.”