In South Australia, the seed harvest is wrapping up, while planting for fresh potatoes goes for 12 months of the year. "The planting in the Adelaide plains has been extremely dry, but is now all planted. The Riverland, Mallee and South East will great ready to plant from mid-July," explains Richard Haynes, National Account Manager at Elders.
"The conditions have been very dry for the harvests across all states and regions, so it has all wrapped up earlier than normal this season, but overall quality has been fine with little disease or virus detected. Volume and yields are in line with expectations."
"Western Australia had a long extremely hot, dry summer so ran short of potatoes but has now caught up. A couple of the processors shut down for around 6 weeks which caused issues with their grower base."
South Australia supplies around 70% of all fresh potatoes across Australia so domestic demand is now relatively consistent.
"Demand is looking solid at this point in time, quality is good and conditions are fine and the frozen (chipping) demand is slowly getting back to normal since the processors have reopened. There is still a lot of frozen product coming into the country late. This may have contributed to issues in the supply chain."
For more information:
Richard Haynes
Elders
[email protected]