Why Less Is More In A Potato Enterprise

Growing and marketing potatoes for maximum profit can be complex, as there is a narrow window for obtaining the highest prices. To ensure his business gets its timing right, GoldenGrow owner Graeme Jarvie employs a ‘less is more’ approach, where the business stays well within its capabilities and so runs smoothly. Lloyd Phillips reports.

- Lloyd Phillips

South Africa is one of only a few countries in the world where the climate and soils are sufficiently diverse to enable year-round potato production. Of course, each part of the country where potatoes are grown has its own optimal window for planting and harvesting. To take advantage of supply-and-demand pricing dynamics, farmers typically aim to sell their harvests at times when potato supplies from other areas of South Africa are dwindling or not yet available.

However, there are always supply overlaps between potato-growing areas, and it is at these times that competition is greatest among farmers.

Graeme Jarvie, who heads up the agricultural operations of his family’s Jarvie Group investment business in KwaZulu-Natal, believes that taking a ‘less is more’ management approach gives the group’s GoldenGrow potato enterprise a number of advantages over its competitors.

Situated in the Seven Oaks area near Greytown, in the Moist Midlands Mistbelt bioresource group, GoldenGrow produces approximately 150ha of potatoes annually under centre-pivot irrigation. This is in rotation with maize and dry bean cash crops, and with oats that are used as both green feed and hay for the Jarvie Group’s beef cattle. The rotation system spreads financial risk, helps break pest and disease cycles, and promotes soil health.

TIMING PRODUCTION OPTIMALLY

Jarvie says that the area’s temperate climate, frequent winter frosts, and high clay, low pH Hutton soils combine to give GoldenGrow a relatively narrow window to plant its seed potatoes, grow them optimally, and harvest and market them efficiently.