By Carol Stiffler
It’s harvest season. That’s true for hobby farmers, currently busy picking and storing corn and tomatoes, and it’s true for large family farms like Walther Farms. Owner Gary Walther said his crew began harvesting potatoes on Monday.
Walther Farms supplies seed potatoes to commercial potato farms who grow for potato chip companies. Owned by nine Walther cousins, the business has farms in nine states and holds 1,500 acres of farmland in Luce County. Their seed potatoes are planted on farms across the country. Chances are, if you buy a bag of Frito Lay, Uncle Ray’s, or Better Made chips, you’re eating a product with roots in Luce County.
That’s the fun side. What’s less fun are the inevitable, enormous harvesters that have to travel slowly on M-28. Taking up a whole lane and the adjacent shoulder of the road, Walther’s harvesters can travel a maximum of 26 miles per hour.
On Monday, about 20 vehicles passed the harvester and its escort vehicle around 9:30 a.m. while they ambled from farm to the storage location east of McMillan on M-28. About half those drivers gave the middle finger to the person driving the harvester – which was Gary Walther, in this case.
“We’re not doing this to disrupt anybody’s life,” Walther said. “If there was a way we could do this and stay out of the way on the road, we would.”
He’s accustomed to driving slowly on M-28 and prefers to do that in the middle of the night when it’s cool and there’s no traffic. That’s just not always possible.
A lot of science, math, and precision goes into growing and harvesting Walther’s potatoes all season long. Their harvest takes about three weeks and begins around September 10 each year and ends by October 5. But every bit of it is dependent on the weather.
“They dig according to the temperature,” said Missy Walther, an agronomist for Yara North America and Gary’s wife. “They dig until it gets too warm or too cold.”
On Monday, they dug until it was too warm: about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Warm potatoes – which are 85% water, Gary Walther said – would rot before they could cool down en masse in storage, despite being stored in climate-controlled buildings. When temperatures grew too warm, digging ceased and Walther drove the harvester back toward its garage location.
The crowd didn’t exactly go wild.
Walther Farms owns four massive John Deere tractors used for harvest work and is currently using nine semi haulers to bring potatoes to storage—16 tons of spuds at a time. The potatoes stay there for months – some will get shipped out in December; the rest will be gone by May.
For the next few weeks, however, expect to see heavy machinery and large vehicles moving in and out of the Walther Farms fields and properties.
“People should be patient,” said Luce County Undersheriff Mike Peters. “Other than that, follow existing traffic laws to the best of their ability. It’s common sense.”
There have been no accidents between Walter’s harvesters and M-28 drivers, Peters said. Most people understand the situation and deal with it.
Peters encourages drivers to “have a little patience” on the road.
“I just wish they would slow down,” he said. “That’s my message to everyone.”
