The 2023/24 potato season is still dragging on with the turn of the year in sight. In recent decades, it has rarely happened that the harvesters were still in the country at the end of December. What has been harvested in recent weeks is either delivered immediately or driven into storage with the expectation that the potatoes will also be more or less forced to be sanded out in the foreseeable future.
The expectation was that all potatoes in the EU-4 countries would have been harvested in the second half of December, but this is certainly still not the case in Belgium, the Netherlands and to a lesser extent France. Due to the persistently wet weather in the last days in the week before Christmas, harvesting work has in many cases come to a standstill. This means that if King Winter does not strike in January, some clearing still needs to be done. The result is that the supply of potatoes from the field, including those that are difficult to store, will determine the market image in the coming weeks. Based on the market picture in January of previous years, it is unlikely that much action can be expected. The expectation is that a market price as shown on the boards today will probably not change much in the first weeks of 2024.
As strange as it may sound today, not all the potatoes from the 2023 harvest have yet been harvested, but then the start of the 2024 harvest is already in sight. How this will be implemented in terms of contract prices, seed potato supply areas, etc. remains to be seen. Particularly when it comes to contract prices, processors are still silent. In this sense, the challenge for the 2024/25 season has not often been so great for potato processors (also when it comes to starch). After the tough growing season of the 2023 harvest year, with a very difficult ending, it will be quite a challenge to maintain the supply of raw materials for the 2024 harvest. So the question is whether the market can rise to contract price plus level in the spring after some normalization (read: less oppressive supply). Given the current futures market quotation of the April 2024 contract (approximately €30,50), this could be the case.