Real Idahoans

Potato farmers have been busy the past few weeks, harvesting all of their potatoes. And shoot, we're not true Idahoans until we've seen the harvesting process, now are we?

So when Thad's coworker invited us to watch his in-laws harvest their potatoes, we were pretty excited! You'll have to excuse my generic terms because I don't know the official names for any of the machinery.

We drove out to the country early Saturday morning so we could go and get back before Conference. The harvesting process is actually quite interesting. In the field, two machines drive through eight rows of potatoes and push all the potatoes into the middle two rows as they go. Then another tractor thing drives behind them and scoops up all the potatoes in the two rows. It scoops them out of the earth and sets them on a conveyor belt that shakes the potatoes to get out all of the clumps and weeds. The belt carries the potatoes up to the top of the truck bed, where an overhanging arm dumps the potatoes over into the back of another truck which drives along-side the tractor. This second truck drives next to the potato scooper truck until it's full, then it drives off and another truck is waiting behind it to take it's place.





At first, all of the loud noises and big machinery absolutely terrified Analyn. She wouldn't let me get near them. Her little body was just shaking. She finally calmed down after a little while, though.



Back at the potato celler, the bottom back of the truck carrying the potatoes opens up, and the potatoes spill out onto another series of conveyor belts, where they are shaken again. Here, workers stand there to pick out the bad potatoes. The rest shoot up the conveyor belt and pour out into the cellar, where they keep the potatoes cool until they are delivered to grocery stores around the nation.



Thad checking out the potatoes.



Just to give you a little perspective on how tall the cellars are, when Thad stood in front of the potato pile, his head didn't even reach the top of the cement slab on the left side of the picture.




Pretty cool, eh? We were sent home with a huge box full of fresh, huge, Idaho potatoes. We had baked potatoes in the oven for dinner and it was the best potato I've ever had.