Potato Potato

I have had the pleasure of really digging in to the potato market here in Bangladesh - looking for that hidden opportunity and find a way that the small holder farmer of 1 acre or less can sell his crop for a little more, use his products a little safer and get a better yeild.

To do that has meant a great number of interviews all across the value chain from the small holder himself to the traders, the middleman, the cold storage, the input supplier, the government officials, the truckers, the exporters and even other NGO's.  A lot of conversations and discussions to better understand what can help the small holder to be more successful

It starts with the seed.

Ready to be planted - planting season is just starting right now and this was the first 'field' going in right near our homestay - About 25 decimal of land which is 1/4 of an acre.

All tillage is by hand, and this is nice stone free dirt!

The beginning of the hilling of potatoes.

There are no potatoes currently growing so I don't have any photo's for that.  Why might you ask are potatoes only grown starting in October?  Well for a large majority of Bangladesh they have 3 crops in a year on the same piece of land.  The other two crops need to be water loving as they are part of the Rainy season so we have seen thousands of acres of rice starting to ripen so that the majority of potato acres will go in after rice harvest in 2 weeks time as we are entering the Dry season and their winter.  For me, the weather has been perfect.  Highs of 24 celsius and no rain.  Overnight lows of 18 celsius - perfect sleeping weather when your house is open to the elements.  I am happy to be here in the dry season.

This means that seed potatoes are starting to come out of storage.  There are some good examples of storage here and some poor examples.  This example will be the large cold storage

This is a 5 story building where they store sacks (84 kg) of potatoes.  At this point the majority of what we saw were seed potatoes left in storage.

But outside there was grading and drying going on before shipping to markets in Rangpur and Dhaka. The building is temperature controlled (but not humidity) and has back-up generators for the frequent power outages that Bangladesh faces.  Moving the bags in and out is all done by hand and there is no elevator - just stairs for each 84 kg bag.

I have seen old men around my village walking like they still have that potato sack on their back - unbelievable really.

Grading and sorting is all done by hand here.

This has been a real learning experience as I take what I think I have experienced before but sit and listen to get a better understanding of what is really going on rather than try and 'push' a North American idea into a totally different reality.  My host mother is always disapointed at how little I eat but I am certain that is because she is used to feeding men that work as hard as these guys do.