Potatoes and Humane Farming

Humane farming meets processing procurement: Are potato buyers ready to reward animal-welfare-linked practices?

Potato buyers already influence how potatoes are grown through contracts, sustainability scorecards, and incentive programs – but animal welfare still sits mostly outside potato procurement. This article explores how “humane-linked” practices could realistically enter potato supply chains through paid add-ons tied to measurable, verifiable actions such as wildlife-safe agronomy, safer rodent control, responsible amendment sourcing, and transition support. Key 2026 signals include new payment triggers, practical verification, and transparent reporting.

Potato News Today names its 2025 ‘Potato Word of the Year’

Potato News Today’s 2025 “Potato Word of the Year” is resilience – not as a slogan, but as the practical requirement for staying profitable and stable in a tougher era. The editorial traces how resilience showed up across the potato system: soil performance and “tired” fields, climate volatility, shifting pest and disease dynamics, higher-stakes storage management, energy and compliance pressures, and oversupply-driven market stress. Runner-up words include transition, whiplash, saturation/glut, and deadpan.

Potatoes and humane farming: Where crop fields and animal welfare meet

This article explores how potatoes are quietly entering the humane farming conversation. It traces the links between potato production, livestock feed, manure use, plant-based proteins, and farmer transitions out of intensive animal agriculture. By highlighting mixed farms, Transfarmation-style initiatives, and the ethical dilemmas around byproducts, it argues that potatoes can help support more humane, climate-smart systems and serve as a meeting place between farmers, animals, and a changing food system.

Shared values, shared fields: Potatoes at the heart of humane and climate-smart farming

This article argues that potato farming already embodies many values driving modern ethical farming – humane treatment, climate responsibility and rural dignity – even if growers rarely use that language. It explores how daily decisions in fields and storages align with wider movements like Mercy For Animals’ Transfarmation project, which helps farmers shift from industrial animal systems to plant-based models, and calls for greater solidarity across sectors to widen the circle of care in our food system.