Name: Why Millions Of Potatoes Are Being Thrown Away During The Pandemic | Big Business
Uploaded: 2021-05-25T11:19:32.000Z
Duration: 7 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We're in the small town of Sheridan, Montana,

Bill Buyan: The potatoes have been awful good

but this year it just really turned sour.

Narrator: And the same thing is happening

Zak Miller: More than half of our market shut down

Narrator: Now farmers across Idaho and Montana

We visited Buyan Ranch, where Peggy and Bill

have been growing potato seed for 59 years.

where farmers grow a variety of seed strains.

Umatilla, Clearwater, and Russet Burbank potatoes.

Each potato variety goes to a specific grower

in either the fresh or processed segment.

Zak: You're actually seeing the potato in its true form.

Narrator: That's foods like a raw potato at a grocery store

or au gratin potatoes at your favorite restaurant.

you see the byproduct or the end result of that.

Narrator: That's the bag of potato chips,

or the precut fries in the frozen section.

they go into storage or are sent to a factory,

Zak: When COVID hit, we had a huge run on retail,

which lasted for about a week to two weeks,

but then when we shut off all the restaurants,

that's when everything came out of kilter.

make up an estimated 55% of all potato crops.

Zak: Think of everything from white-table restaurants

Narrator: So when food-service establishments shut down

because of COVID-19, it was a chain effect.

And more than half of the industry's potatoes

In Peggy's case, her customers in Washington

and she and Bill were stuck with tons of seed

Zak: You can't take some of these facilities

You're asking - a square peg in a round hole,

I guess, is the best analogy I can come up with.

Narrator: The surplus potatoes also couldn't

Zak: Grocery stores or retails would have been

Bill: We had high hopes that maybe something

to send them somewhere for some kind of processing.

But this year's, there's just no market for them,

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Why Millions Of Potatoes Are Being Thrown Away During The Pandemic | Big Business

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