Chris Voigt: Advocating for Potato Growers in Washington State

Chris Voigt: Advocating for Potato Growers in Washington State

Potato farming and processing are responsible for about $7.5 billion of economic activity and about 36,000 jobs in Washington State.

Potatoes are a mainstay of the food supply both in the United States and around the world. As the global population expands, so does the demand for food. This is the challenge farmers are striving to meet while also dealing with the aftermath of the COVID‐19 pandemic, increased costs of production, and labor and climate mandates. The Washington State Potato Commission is on the front lines of these issues and works daily to represent the interests of Washington State’s potato growers. In this interview, the commission’s executive director, Chris Voigt, tells Irrigation Leader about the importance of irrigation and water infrastructure to potato production, the crucial issues facing potato growers in the state, and the way the commission's members are rising to meet new challenges for the future.

Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about yourself and how you came to be in your current position.

Chris Voigt: I grew up in Oregon, went to Oregon State University (OSU), and I got my start in agriculture through FFA. I took a gap year between high school and college and served as the FFA state president. What a wonderful experience that was for an 18‐year-old kid: Traveling around the state and staying with 70 different host families was a great snapshot of Americana. I studied agricultural economics at OSU and went on to work in the ag chemical business for about a decade. I worked for the National Potato Promotion Board for about 6 years, then worked for the Colorado Potato Administrative Committee for about 3 years, and now I’ve been the executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission for the last 15 years.

Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about the history of your organization and its mission.

Chris Voigt: The organization was formed back in 1956. The potato growers of Washington State got together and realized they could not each afford to do their own promotions in Chicago or to individually hire researchers, entomologists, and breeders. They decided to come together and jointly fund things like these. They went to the legislature, and the legislature created the potato commission. We’re a quasigovernmental agency. We are overseen by the Washington Department of Agriculture. We receive no state funding, but our founding legislation gives us a mandatory taxing ability. Our growers pay 4 cents for every 100 pounds of potatoes they grow. Those pennies add up to roughly $3.5 million, which we use for promotions, research, and governmental affairs.

Irrigation Leader: How many potato farmers are there in Washington State?

Chris Voigt: We have about 300 potato farmers, including family members who work together. That boils down to about 100 farms. These 100 farms are responsible for about $7.5 billion of economic activity and 36,000 jobs. The reason those economic and job numbers are so high is all the value-added processing that occurs in Washington State. We have the highest potato yields of any place in the world, so processors love setting up shop in Washington State, where they can get consistent high yields of high-quality potatoes. There are a lot of jobs associated with the processing and exporting of those potatoes and potato products.

Irrigation Leader: How important is irrigation to the potato industry in Washington State?

Chris Voigt: It’s critical. Just as you need to water your vegetable garden in the summer, you need to water potatoes. Approximately 90 percent of the potato production in Washington State occurs in a desert region that gets about 7 inches of precipitation per year, so irrigation is critical. One of the primary reasons we’ve been able to attain the highest yields in the world is that we can provide the exact amount of water a plant needs, exactly when it needs it, via our irrigation systems. That eliminates risk and is an efficient way of growing these plants.

Irrigation Leader: What are the top issues for the potato commission?

Chris Voigt: We are just coming off the most difficult legislative session that we’ve ever had—probably the most antiagriculture legislative session in history. During the pandemic, we were probably affected more than anybody else in the country, because 90 percent of what we grow is processed, and about 90 percent of that is served in a food service establishment. When the pandemic hit, we lost 90 percent of our customers overnight, which had huge ramifications for our industry. Then, the legislature came out with a series of bills that drove up the cost of production in Washington: bills regarding climate, cap and trade taxes, and ag overtime. We are now one of a few states in the country that are going to have to pay overtime to our ag workers. It puts us at a big cost disadvantage compared with a lot of other states. The legislature just doesn’t understand agriculture, and that drives home how important it is for us to make a really strong effort to be better at telling our story.

Washington State is home to some of the highest-yielding potato fields in the world.

Irrigation Leader: What is your message to the state legislature?

Chris Voigt: We are good at making food for people, so you’ve got to work hand in hand with us to make good legislation. We have few legislators with an ag background, and there are many people who don’t understand what we do and what it takes to make food. It’s a complicated process. Our industry is unlike others because there is so much risk involved based on factors that are out of our control— everything from trade embargoes to politics to weather events. Agriculture is the number 2 industry in the state of Washington, so it’s critically important to the economy and the livelihood of the state, especially those of struggling rural areas. The urban counties in Washington State are doing great, but a lot of the rural counties are struggling, and unemployment there is really high. We need to do what we can not only allow to allow ag to survive, but to help these regions prosper.

One of the pieces of legislation the legislature attempted to pass was mandatory predictive scheduling for employees. That might work in some businesses with 9-to-5 jobs, but in our industry, we cannot tell our employees exactly what their work schedules are going to be 2 weeks out. If you could tell me exactly when it’s going to rain and when it’s going to be too cold or too hot to harvest, we could do that. We can’t control all the variables at play, so there’s no way we can do predictive scheduling for employees. It just doesn’t work.

Irrigation Leader: How important to the potato industry in Washington State is the transportation provided and the power produced by the Snake River dams?

Chris Voigt: The Snake River dams are hugely important for many reasons. The first, and probably the most important, is irrigation. Those dams provide irrigation pools that we can pump out of. We irrigate some of the highest-yielding potato fields in the world with water from the Snake River.

The second reason is hydropower. Agriculture and food production require a lot of electricity. We have a high concentration of processors in Washington State, and they’re all large energy users. We need access to inexpensive hydroelectric power. Hydropower is the base power source of the Northwest. We can’t rely on wind and solar. The sun’s not always shining, and the winds are not always blowing, so you’ve got to have a backup power source. If it weren’t for hydro, we’d have to use other sources like nuclear, natural gas, or coal.

Thousands of jobs in Washington State are associated with the processing and exporting of potatoes.

Transportation is the final reason. Every potato grower is also a wheat grower, and a tremendous amount of grain is shipped down the Snake River. From there, it goes out and feeds the world. That’s why the navigation system on the Snake River is important to maintain. In addition to exporting our products, we also use it to bring in inputs and goods, including fertilizers and fuel.

Irrigation Leader: Do you have any comments about fish survivability at the dams on the Snake River?

Chris Voigt: It’s an easy soundbite to say that we can tear out the Snake River dams and solve all the fish issues, but that’s not the case. There are studies showing that the detrimental effects on our salmon populations are caused by what’s happening in the ocean. The precise cause is a big question mark. Fish stocks are in decline in other rivers in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, even rivers that don’t have dams. It’s not the dams; there’s something else going on out there. It doesn’t make sense to remove the dams.

Irrigation Leader: What are your thoughts on the efforts of the East Columbia Basin Irrigation District (ECBID) to bring surface water to the Odessa region?

Chris Voigt: Odessa is really critical for us as an industry. A lot of people don’t know this, but the soil up in the Odessa subregion is heavier soil. We don’t know the exact science behind it, but the potatoes it produces can be stored longer than potatoes that are grown in sandy ground. Our processors rely on those potatoes later in the season. Odessa potatoes go into storage as soon as they are harvested and are the last ones used. If we didn’t have the potatoes that are grown out in the Odessa region, our processors wouldn’t be able to run their plants year round, which would make them less cost effective. The ECBID’s work to get surface water to the Odessa region to replace the deep wells there is critically important. The ECBID has made some good strides, and it has been one of the bright spots of this legislative session. We have gotten some additional dollars out of the state legislature to help with the engineering and design of some of these lateral systems that are being used to deliver surface water from the canal, allowing those wells to be turned off.

Irrigation Leader: Would you like to say anything about the Columbia Basin Development League (CBDL)?

Chris Voigt: The CBDL is an essential partner. It has been incredibly important in helping us with the declining Odessa aquifer. One of our overarching goals is to encourage the full development of the Columbia Basin Project (CBP). Congress originally designed and approved the CBP to cover over a million acres of irrigated agricultural ground, but building stopped about two thirds of the way through its completion. Now, there’s an opportunity to expand the CBP to its full capacity. As we look at sustainability, it’s becoming more and more clear that we need more agricultural ground. As we move toward regenerative farming practices, we need to have longer rotations to improve soil health. Right now, we’re maxed out for potato acres. We cannot grow another acre of potatoes in the Columbia basin because of the rotation that we have to have. For every acre of potatoes we grow, we need another 3 acres in reserve to rotate to. The only way we can do that is by having more acres, and to get more acres, we need more irrigation, so the full build-out of the CBP is going to be important as we go forward.

Irrigation Leader: So after a farmer grows an acre of potatoes, they don’t return to the same ground for another 4 years?

Chris Voigt: Correct, and that is with fumigation. If we didn’t have fumigation, farmers would only be able to grow potatoes there once every 12 years. A lot of that has to do with one particular pest, a fungus that lives in the soil and it causes a disease called Verticillium wilt.

Irrigation Leader: What is your message to Congress?

Chris Voigt: One of the critical things about Washington State that Congress needs to know is that it is a great place to make food. We have the highest potato yields in the world, and we have a sustainable water supply that comes out of the Columbia River. All the climate models indicate that the water supply of the Columbia River is in pretty good shape, mostly because its headwaters are located on the western side of the Canadian Rockies. We’re going to have pretty good water supply out of that area in the future. Other parts of the country suffer from drought, a lack of snowfall, or early snow melts, but we do not, so it’s going to make sense to relocate some of that agriculture to the Columbia basin. We want to be a major food producer to help the United States maintain its national food security.

Chris Voigt is the executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission. He can be reached at cvoigt@potatoes.com.