An Idaho potato farmer reflects on challenging 2026 & why he’s turning to AI for help

Whether enjoyed baked whole or made into fries, potatoes are a staple crop enjoyed by families across the U.S. and the globe. However, years of increased potato production are catching up to demand, creating a supply-and-demand issue for farmers like Idahoan Taylor Grant.

Grant is a third-generation potato grower in Rupert, Idaho, where he serves as the chief operations officer for Grant 4-D Farms, a farm with roughly 30,000 irrigated acres, growing mostly russet potatoes. Grant 4-D Farms is one of four family farms that sell to grower-owned food manufacturer The Mart Group, which sells fresh, frozen, and processed potatoes to distributors, grocers, and wholesalers.

Potato farmers had another challenging year in 2026 due to a combination of economic and weather events, Grant told AgNavigator. Years of production growth have changed the supply-demand balance, leading to lower potato prices, he pointed out.

“The capacity for the industry to supply potatoes to the market has really exceeded the demand. So, when you get to basic economics and supply and demand, when you get too much supply, the value starts to drop off,” Grant said.

Like many farmers, Grant is also grappling with higher diesel prices during the harvest, driven in part by the Iran conflict. At harvest, Grant 4-D Farms “put 90% of the costs already in the ground,” so the farm has to stomach the higher fuel costs to harvest the crop, Grant noted.

“Those fuel costs translate not only for cost of running tractors, trucks, things like that, but then fertilizer had also ramped up quite a bit. You can only back fertilizer off so much before you start to hurt the ability to grow a good crop, and so we really try to continue to apply fertilizer as we see it necessary to grow a good and high-quality crop, and to make sure that the soils continue to stay healthy — that we’re not robbing ourselves in the future,” Grant elaborated.

On top of rising input costs, Idaho had a “really odd spring,” where February was drier and warmer than in March and April, which provided some challenges to the planting season, Grant noted. Additionally, Canadian wildfire smoke hampered potato growth across parts of Idaho, though impacts varied by region, he added.

“My guess is Western Idaho is going to be a little bit above average, and Central Idaho is going to be on average, and Eastern Idaho is going to be probably a little bit below average. … We’re going to still have some good quality. I would say the quality that we were putting away is probably some of the best quality that I’ve seen in the last several years,” he elaborated.

‘The next biggest technology shift is not steel and tractors’

Fuel and fertilizer are not the only inputs that are rising in prices. Machinery prices are going up, which is putting pressure on farmers to make up the difference by farming more acres, Grant explained.

“When you talk about harvest equipment, that’s one of the reasons why operations have to get bigger because the cost of equipment, cost of tractors [has] gotten expensive,” Grant said. “I remember tractors you could rent a really high-horsepower tractor for $45 an hour, and today that same tractor is going to cost you $100 to $110 an hour.”

When it comes to building a more efficient operation, Grant is using AI to inform his operations, whether through automatic reports or automatic text messages, Grant explained. Grant 4-D Farms can use AI to build dashboards and other tools without major tech investments, he added.

“For our operation, the next biggest technology shift is not steel and tractors. The next technology shift is how can we adapt and use the AI technology that’s coming on. ... How do we build tools with it? How do we implement it so that we can be much more effective in our operating system,” Grant elaborated.