Idaho’s 2026 Potato Harvest: Solid Quality, Lower Yields and Smaller Tubers
Idaho's 2026 potato harvest is shaping up as a quality year but not a volume year. "Quality is consistent all over, from what I hear. Yields are down. We're not yet sure by how much," said Travis Blacker, industry relations director at the Idaho Potato Commission, as digging moved into its decisive phase in late September. After the largely "picture-perfect" growing conditions of 2025, this season brought "challenges with some frost in different areas, some heat and some wind," Blacker said — and most growers expect lower yields.
The season's weather pattern was uneven from the start. March was overly warm in eastern Idaho, prompting early planting; cold snaps followed in late April and late May, then frost in June. Summer nights stayed warmer than a year earlier, suppressing specific gravity — the dry-matter measure processors watch closely — and yields in varieties that prefer wider day-night temperature swings. In the state's southwest, wildfire smoke compounded the heat stress. "It wasn't so much the daytime highs that got us. The nighttime lows didn't quite get low enough for us on the west side of the state. And wildfire smoke did an awful lot of damage," said Nick Blanksma, who farms near Hammett.
Field reports converge on the same conclusion. Kamren Koompin of American Falls, growing for the processing segment, said his red and Umatilla yields are down from the high-yield 2025 season and just below the long-term average, while Russet Burbank is anecdotally down substantially from last year; his Clearwater Russet looks average. Ryan Wahlen, sales manager at Aberdeen-based grower-shipper Pleasant Valley Potato, was blunter: yields looked "as bad as we've had in years," likely down 50 to 60 sacks per acre from 2025, with smaller size profiles. Some eastern Idaho growers delayed digging in hopes tubers would bulk up. "After those events, all of the fields came back but they were never the same," Wahlen said of the frost damage.
Weekdays. Unsubscribe in one click.
The structural numbers point the same way. The Commission projects 2026 planted area at 298,915 acres based on field-level counts — about 13,000 acres below last year. Against yields of 440 hundredweight per acre in 2025 and 430 in 2024 (USDA NASS), even a modest percentage decline on a reduced base trims Idaho's marketable supply meaningfully for the 2026/27 marketing year.
For the market, the implications are double-edged. A lighter Idaho crop supports fresh and processing prices after two years of pressure on grower margins, but smaller tuber size profiles complicate both the fresh-pack count-size mix and processor recovery rates. Quality, by all accounts, is not the problem — consistency and volume are. With harvest essentially on schedule and September weather favourable for digging, the trade's attention now shifts to storage quality and how quickly packers and processors adjust contract expectations to the smaller crop.
