By Lukie Pieterse, Potato News Today

Exploring how whole-farm resilience – from soil and rotations to storage, contracts and people – can help potato businesses move from survival mode to long-term stability in a tougher climate.

In many potato regions of the world today, resilience is no longer a slogan – it is the only realistic business model. Weather is wilder, markets swing harder, and production costs are far less forgiving. The growers who will still be standing ten years from now are not necessarily the ones with the highest yields, but the ones who have quietly rebuilt their entire system around resilience – from soil to storage to contracts and cash flow.

This feature looks at resilience as a whole-farm strategy. It does not revisit detailed drought tactics or fertilizer technologies. Instead, it focuses on the underlying system design that allows those tools to actually work: soil health, rotation, storage, contracts, risk-sharing, data and, not least, the people who hold it all together.

Rethinking resilience: from crisis response to system design

For years, resilience was treated as a response to bad seasons: add an extra fungicide spray, drill an emergency well, renegotiate a contract after a disastrous year. That crisis mindset is understandable, but it is not enough in a climate where “abnormal” seasons are now arriving back-to-back.

A more durable view of resilience includes:

• Biophysical resilience – soils, varieties, rotations, storage systems that can absorb shocks and still deliver salable tonnes.
• Economic resilience – cost structures, contracts, insurance and marketing strategies that spread risk instead of concentrating it.
• Operational resilience – labour, logistics and storage capacity that can handle delayed harvests, compressed windows and sudden market moves.
• Human resilience – decision-makers who have the information, peer support and mental bandwidth to steer the business under stress.

Seen this way, resilience is not a bolt-on. It is a design principle that shapes almost every major choice on a potato farm.

Soil health: the farm’s built-in shock absorber

If any single layer underpins a resilient potato business, it is soil. In a tougher climate, soils that drain well in a wet spring yet hold moisture in a dry summer are worth more than another fancy piece of steel.

Key elements include:

• Organic matter and structure – Higher organic matter improves infiltration, water-holding capacity and trafficability. Well-structured soils recover more quickly from intense rain and are less prone to clodding and compaction in tight field windows.
• Active biology – A diverse microbial community can support nutrient cycling and suppress certain soil-borne diseases, reducing the severity of stress-related breakdown in wet or hot years.
• Aggregation and cover – Cover crops, reduced tillage where feasible, and avoiding unnecessary traffic help reduce erosion and keep the soil surface protected against driving rain and wind.

Practical moves that many growers are adopting or testing include:

• Integrating multi-species cover crops between potato crops, especially mixes that add deep rooting and residue.
• Targeted use of composts, manures and other organic amendments to build carbon on lighter or tired fields.
• Controlled traffic or at least more disciplined traffic patterns to limit compaction zones.
• Being more selective about which fields are “potato fields” at all, reserving the most resilient land for the heaviest production commitments.

These changes are not cosmetic. In years of extreme rain or sudden drought, they often spell the difference between a crop that limps through and one that fails outright.

Smarter rotations and landscape planning

Resilience is not only what happens within a field, but across the whole farm and its surrounding landscape. Rotations that looked adequate thirty years ago can now be marginal under pressure from more aggressive pathogens and pests, as well as more erratic weather.

A whole-farm resilience mindset asks:

• How long are the potato breaks on high-risk fields for PCN, Verticillium, black dot and other soil-borne issues?
• Are there enough break crops – cereals, pulses, oilseeds, forage – to dilute disease and weed pressure across the farm?
• Are the most weather-exposed fields carrying the most demanding contracts, or are sensitive commitments tied to the more forgiving blocks?
• Are fields grouped by soil type and microclimate so operations can be prioritized when windows open?

Practical shifts include:

• Lengthening rotations on stressed fields, even if it means fewer potato hectares in the short term, to preserve long-term viability.
• Introducing legumes or deep-rooted cover crops to repair structure and improve nitrogen dynamics.
• Using field benchmarking to identify “problem” fields where yield volatility is high and reconsidering their place in the most demanding supply programs.

In short, rotations become less about calendar habit and more about strategic risk management.

Seed quality and variety choice as climate insurance

Variety choice and seed quality are often discussed in terms of yield and specification fit. In a tougher climate, they are also key resilience tools.

A more resilience-focused approach looks at:

• Stress tolerance – heat tolerance, drought tolerance, tolerance to wet finishes and delayed harvests.
• Disease resistance – especially for late blight, viruses and storage diseases that flare when seasons don’t follow the old patterns.
• Bruise and damage resilience – particularly important when harvest happens in marginal conditions.
• Storage behaviour – varieties that hold quality over longer periods give more flexibility in marketing when supply-demand balances are shifting.

Seed quality layers on top of this. High health status, low virus load and good physiological age all influence how plants respond to stress. A compromised seed lot might look manageable in a perfect year, but in a season with heat spikes and cold snaps, it becomes a liability.

Resilient businesses increasingly treat seed as a strategic asset: working closely with seed suppliers, building multi-year relationships, and sometimes securing seed from more than one region to buffer regional weather risks.

Storage: from weak link to resilience engine

In a volatile climate and market, storage is no longer a passive holding space. It is a major lever of resilience – but only if it is designed and managed accordingly.

A resilience-focused storage strategy considers:

• Infrastructure – insulation, ventilation, air distribution, humidification and refrigeration that can handle warmer autumns, later harvests and more variable tuber temperatures at intake.
• Monitoring and control – sensors for temperature, humidity and CO₂, coupled with reliable control systems that maintain stable conditions despite external fluctuations.
• Power security – backup generators and contingency plans for power interruptions that are becoming more common with extreme weather.
• Segregation capacity – the ability to separate lots by variety, field, intake condition and market destination, so problems in one block do not cascade through the entire store.

When storage is robust, it gives growers options:

• To harvest at the least damaging moment in a bad-weather window.
• To carry potatoes longer into the season when prices justify it.
• To switch market destinations if certain outlets go soft while others firm up.

Conversely, under-invested storage can turn a marginal season into a financial crisis. In that sense, storage investments are not just costs – they are insurance against a tougher operating environment.

Contracts, markets and risk-sharing – resilience beyond the field

In a more volatile climate, resilience cannot stop at the farm gate. Contract structures and marketing strategies can either spread climate risk or magnify it.

Key questions to ask include:

• Does the current mix of free-market, open, and contracted tonnes expose the business to extreme downside in poor years, or is there a balance?
• Are contracts structured purely around volume and penalties, or do they include mechanisms to share risk under exceptional weather or systemic shocks?
• Is there room to negotiate multi-year frameworks that provide enough stability for both grower and buyer to invest in resilience (e.g. storage upgrades, irrigation, low-carbon practices)?

Some of the more resilience-minded approaches seen in the sector include:

• Aligning a core proportion of production with longer-term, cost-of-production-informed contracts, and leaving a smaller slice for opportunistic upside.
• Working through grower organizations or cooperatives to negotiate clearer force majeure or extraordinary-weather clauses.
• Exploring contracts that reward performance under stress – for example, premiums for potatoes produced under verified sustainability or resilience programs.

The basic principle is simple: extreme climate risk cannot sit entirely on one side of the table indefinitely without damaging the entire supply chain.

Financial resilience and cost structure discipline

Weather shocks are ultimately expressed in cash flow. A farm with thin liquidity, high fixed costs and little flexibility is more vulnerable than a farm with similar soils but healthier financial buffers.

Important elements include:

• Maintaining realistic working capital reserves to survive poor years without panic asset sales.
• Stress-testing budgets against two or three “bad year” scenarios rather than assuming average yields and prices.
• Carefully scrutinizing fixed machinery and building costs that raise the break-even point and leave less room for error.
• Matching debt structure to risk – longer-term, fixed-rate arrangements for essential infrastructure; more flexible options for shorter-lived assets.

Resilience here is less visible than a new harvester or a bigger shed, but it often determines whether a run of difficult seasons is survivable.

Data, benchmarking and scenario planning

Resilient businesses rarely fly blind. They know their numbers and use them.

That does not necessarily mean complex software on every desk, but it does mean:

• Field-level records of yield, quality, input use and margins over multiple seasons.
• Benchmarking fields and varieties against each other to identify which combinations are most vulnerable to stress.
• Using these insights to decide where to concentrate potatoes, where to extend rotations and where to step back.
• Running simple “what if” scenarios – for example, What if yield drops 15 % for the next two seasons? What if input costs rise another 10 %? – and planning responses in advance.

As climate volatility increases, historical averages become less reliable guides. Scenario planning and sensitivity analysis help growers make decisions that remain robust under a wider range of possible futures.

People, skills and decision-making under pressure

A resilient potato business ultimately rests on the people who run it. In tougher conditions, the workload and emotional burden can both increase: tighter windows, more complicated logistics, higher financial stakes.

Elements of human resilience include:

• Skills and cross-training – ensuring key tasks are not dependent on a single person, and that staff can cover critical roles when illness or exhaustion hits.
• Decision support – having trusted agronomic, financial and technical advisors who can provide perspective when the pressure is on.
• Peer networks – participation in grower groups, storage organizations and discussion circles that allow frank sharing of both successes and failures.
• Well-being – recognizing that chronic stress erodes judgement, and that mental health is a legitimate farm asset worth protecting.

Good decisions in a crisis often draw on conversations, reflections and planning that happened months or years earlier. Investing in people and networks is therefore part of a resilience strategy, not an optional extra.

Policy, insurance and collective resilience

No individual grower can build resilience in isolation from the policy and infrastructure environment around them. Public and industry-level decisions strongly influence the risk profile of potato production.

Areas where collective action matters include:

• Crop insurance and risk management programs that are responsive to new patterns of loss, not just historical averages.
• Water infrastructure – reservoirs, irrigation schemes, drainage networks – that help entire regions buffer extremes, not just individual farms.
• Industry-wide initiatives on storage standards, safety and technology adoption that raise the floor for everyone.
• Data-sharing platforms, where aggregated and anonymized information helps identify emerging disease patterns, yield trends or climate impacts at regional scale.

Grower organizations, research institutes and trade bodies have a central role here. Their advocacy can determine whether policy frameworks evolve in step with the new climate reality – or lag behind it.

Practical steps: a resilience checklist for the next five years

To move from surviving to thriving, resilience planning needs to convert into concrete action. Over the next five years, many growers will be asking themselves variations of the following questions:

• Which 10–20 % of my land base is most exposed to yield volatility, and what changes in rotation or use are needed there?
• How can I raise organic matter and improve structure on my weakest soils in a targeted way?
• Do my current varieties and seed sources match the stress patterns I am actually seeing, not just the climate I used to have?
• Is my storage infrastructure capable of handling later harvests, warmer intakes and more variable quality without excessive losses?
• Is my mix of contracts and open-market exposure appropriate for a more volatile climate?
• How resilient is my cost structure and cash flow to two consecutive below-average seasons?
• What data do I already have – and what simple records do I need to start – to support better decisions?
• Who are the key advisors and peers I rely on in a crisis, and how can those relationships be strengthened?
• Am I engaging with grower organizations and policymakers to help shape the broader risk environment I operate in?

Even small, deliberate improvements across several of these areas can, together, transform the resilience profile of a farm.

From surviving to thriving

The potato sector has always been exposed to weather risk, price risk and policy risk. What has changed is the frequency and intensity of shocks, and the shrinking margin for error. Trying to manage this new world with the old toolkit – last-minute adjustments, one-off fixes, short-term deals – will keep many businesses in permanent survival mode.

Shifting towards a truly resilient model means redesigning the system: building healthier soils, smarter rotations, more robust storage, fairer contracts, stronger finances, better data and stronger human networks. None of these changes is instantaneous. Most require multi-year thinking and, often, multi-year investment.

But they also open the door to something more hopeful than simply coping. A resilient potato business is better placed to capture premiums for quality and sustainability, to supply buyers who value stability, to adopt new technologies with confidence, and to hand a viable operation to the next generation.

In a tougher climate, that is what thriving will look like – not an absence of shocks, but a sector that can take the hits and still move forward.

Author: Lukie Pieterse, Potato News Today