“The potato harvest is in full swing. Conditions are mixed to good, depending on the region and weather,” predicts Thorsten Riggert, hoping for an excellent harvest for the Lower Saxony potato farmers. In addition to September being a month when the harvest of potatoes often begins, which lasts through mid-October, it’s also the month when festivals celebrating potatoes were popular before the Covid time.
“We hope that with the return of the folk festivals and further opening of gastronomy, people will eat more of our delicious potato in all its varieties and thus consumption will increase again,” one farmer in Heide says to Landvolk-Pressedienst.
115,400 hectares in Lower Saxony are planted with potatoes in 2021, amounting to nearly half of Germany’s potato production. Agrarmarkt-Informations-Gesellschaft (AMI) preliminary estimates estimate that in 2021, potatoes will be grown on roughly 259,000 hectares in Germany, a decrease of 4.2 percent from 2020. “Lower Saxony’s potato acreage has also shrunk by almost 7,000 ha compared to 2020,” Riggert stated, Based on the acreage of 122,200 ha last year. Yet Riggert suspects that in 2021 there will be even more potatoes planted than in the drought year of 2018. The yields of the previous season can easily surpass those of this year.
In Germany, the great tuber is by far the top seller, according to the Kartoffel-Marketing-Gesellschaft (KMG). “The potato is undisputedly the star. German citizens consume over 64 kilograms per capita – as a side dish to meat dishes, but also as a vegetarian or vegan superfood,”
German potato production boomed in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, compared with 2019. With 146,000 metric tonnes, private households purchased the largest quantities of table potatoes in both March 2020 and March 2021, with 147,000 tonnes. Despite a slight drop in demand in 2021, the industry still posted a high of 97,000 tonnes almost every month of the year barring August. In the 31st week of the calendar year, food retailers reversed the trend by running promotions, which resulted in more potatoes being sold than ever before.
“The courting of potato sales continued in September, and we hope the market will continue to develop positively,” explains Riggert, who represents potato growers at UNIKA, the German Potato Association.
Source : Freshplaza.com
