The last kilo of potatoes makes or breaks the grower.

It is difficult to find bright spots in the potato market, and they can still be found. For a large proportion of the potatoes, agreements have been made in advance between growers and buyers. Hard figures are hard to come by, but it is said that agreements have been made in one way or another for 75% or 80% of the potatoes. A significant portion of these are under contract with a fixed price. From the grower's perspective, this is working out very well this season. An average of just over €27 for Fontane and €29 for Innovator for delivery in week 17 is reasonably a price that a farmer can work with. A caveat we can add, however, is that you must be able to deliver the quality. High underwater weights and dry conditions during harvesting mean that is by no means a given.

For the delivery kilos and the pools, the picture is far less rosy. Quotations in the EU-4 have barely been above €4 this season. You don't need to be highly educated to make a rough estimate of what the pool results will be. That is where the participants already prepared for it by some players. In light of the current market, the pools that focused early on alternative sales channels (flakes, bait, etc.) may actually be the best off.

Alternative sales channels are likely to become strained. Potato flakes do not have an unlimited shelf life, and let's just say a stock of those has already been produced over the past few months. Officially, it is actually not allowed, but a batch with a high underwater weight has probably also ended up in the starch. With the end of the starch campaign in sight, you lose that possibility as well. Ultimately, there is also a limit to what can be sold for feed potatoes. It is no coincidence that PotatoNL recorded minus €2 to minus €1 for feed potatoes on Monday, March 23. Digestion is a last resort, but some insiders indicate that the sale of digestate is tight.

The grazing season is approaching
Meanwhile, the supply of potatoes seems to be increasing even further. Partly, this is due to the supply of unsold seed potatoes. At the same time, growers of free-market potatoes are also starting to feel unsatisfied. Gassing and cooling are certainly not free, and with a considerable stock of contract potatoes hanging over the market, it is not surprising that free-market growers want to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

With a bit of luck, demand for feed potatoes may increase in about a month. The grass is growing well, and by then the first cut will be ensiled. Last autumn, we also saw substantial volumes ensiled along with the maize and autumn grass. That might be possible again in the spring.

Two bad years are rare
The outlook for the remainder of the 2025 potato harvest season is not encouraging. Of course, that does not mean that the mood cannot turn around in the slightly longer term. In the 2017 harvest year, potatoes also grew well, and the market was abysmal with correspondingly low prices. 2018 was a very dry year, and the cash settlement did not drop below €25 during the sales season. Just as two consecutive seasons with high prices are exceptional, the same applies to two consecutive seasons with extremely low potato prices.

The worst-case scenario for the upcoming harvest would be that sales of fries on the world market falter, the acreage does not shrink sufficiently, and that you also get a textbook growing season with record yields. However, if fries sales do pick up, growers plant fewer hectares, and hectare yields lag behind due to drought for example, the world could look very different.

The last kilo
Making a guess at what to expect right at the start of the season is difficult. With the experience of the last harvest still fresh in mind, the group of growers who are going to plant an extra corner of free-market potatoes on a whim because there is still some cheap seed available does not seem to be large. In fact, growers are actually seeking extra certainty in fixed-price agreements. Buyers are only meeting this demand to a limited extent.

At the same time, we see that fertilizer and diesel are quite expensive. Watching the costs per hectare—for example, by not spreading that last kilo of fertilizer or waiting as long as possible before irrigating—may well outweigh the need for growers this coming growing season by doing everything possible to squeeze the last (and technically most expensive) kilo of potatoes out of the crop. It is precisely those last kilos that determine, to a significant extent, what you have left as a grower at the bottom line, in both expensive and cheap potato years.