How Did Idaho Become Known for Potatoes?
By: Moriah Rivera-Lawrence
Tags: United States, Fun Facts, Farming, Agriculture

Photo by Eiliv-Sonas Aceron on Unsplash

How Did Idaho Become Known for Potatoes?

Whether you’re not sure if potatoes grow underground or on trees, if chickens have ears, or if you can farm an alligator, these five fun ag facts will fill you in on a few interesting facts about US Farming and Agriculture.

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Idaho Was Too Dry For Potatoes

Per The Idaho Potato Museum website, extensive irrigation across the state of Idaho was needed to make it possible for potatoes to thrive there.

Irrigation plays a critical role in the growing and production of potatoes. The Carey Act of 1894 made it possible for more land to be opened up for agricultural use. Under this Act, the so-called public land states with desert lands were offered one million federal acres each, provided they would cause the granted lands to be irrigated. Idaho benefited from the Carey Act far more than did any other state. About 60% of all lands irrigated in the United States under the Carey Act are in Idaho. Over the period of forty years, the state of Idaho received 618,000 acres of previously desert, arid land. — Idaho Potato Museum

Due to the way the snowmelt is collected off the mountains for irrigation and the rich soil, Idaho now produces nearly a third of the nation’s potatoes.

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Alligators are a Farm Animal

Cows go: “Moo!”

Pigs go: “Oink!”

Alligators go — “Wait, what?”

Alligator farming is a multimillion-dollar, heavily regulated industry. Many consumers are looking to purchase meat, hide, bones, and teeth. Due to lots of legalities surrounding alligators, the hunting and farming of these animals is highly regulated. Hides from animals that have gone without being injured or scraped are typically considered very valuable. With Covid-19, however, the industry has been having extra trouble remaining stable in 2020.

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Our Number One Crop Is Inedible

Each year, we drench our lawns with enough water to fill the Chesapeake Bay! That makes grass — not corn — America’s largest irrigated crop. Our nation’s lawns now cover an area larger than New York State, and, each year, we use about 2.4 million metric tons of fertilizer just to maintain them. When there is too much fertilizer on our lawns, essential nutrients are easily washed away by sprinklers and rainstorms. When these nutrients enter storm drains and water bodies, they often become one of the most harmful sources of water pollution in the United States-Bill Norrington, UCSB Geography

Corn is typically cited as the USA’s number one crop, and while it is the biggest one that is actually grown for food, the US actually grows more acreage of lawns. Three times larger in fact, than any other irrigated crop in the country. With these tiny patches of turf being managed by millions of different people, experts are concerned about the environmental impact of the improper use of fertilizers and herbicides and how those chemicals might drain into waterways. Some of the environmental concern surrounds the amount of drinking water that is allocated to lawns as well.

Much of this grass is sourced from seeds grown in the grass seed capital of the world, near Tangent, Oregon.

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Crunching the Greens and the Numbers

One acre of land can currently produce 50,000lbs of strawberries or 2,784lbs of wheat. This means 166 people locally and abroad can eat off of the produce that one small US farm creates on average. Based on these calculations, if the global population increases at the expected rate, we should hope farmers have figured out how to grow 70% more food than what is currently being produced by 2050.

Hoping for an organic future? Currently, organic food takes 2.5 times the labor to produce, so the technology must come even further to build a sustainable future. Especially considering the current average pay for an agricultural laborer is $12.42 per hour, and the field is not expected to grow more than 1% in the next several years.

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The Chicken or The Eggshell?

I learned early on that there is absolutely no difference between eggshells if they are brown, white, speckled, or even green. However, from personal experience, I can tell you that blue eggshells just don’t peel off a boiled egg well. Officially, eggshell colors do not change anything about the egg except the obvious.

“The differences in eggshell color is solely due to genetics,” says Olivia Tarantino writing for Eat This, Not That.

What the shell color will not tell you is the nutrition content. That’s what the yolk color is for.

As for the difference in nutrients between yolk colors? The protein and fat counts will often remain the same regardless of yolk color, but there can be up to a 100-fold increase in micronutrient value of certain antioxidant carotenoids like lutein and beta-carotene in yolks fed a more nutrient-dense diet (like in pasture-raised hens), according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.-Olivia Tarantino, Eat This, Not That, November 17, 2020

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What can the eggshell color tell you, though? The earlobe color of the chicken!

“There is no outer ear, such as we humans have, but chickens do have earlobes which can be clearly seen. The colour of the lobe varies with the breed of the chicken, ranging from white to almost black. Chickens with white earlobes lay white eggs exclusively while birds with dark lobes lay brown eggs. The fascinating Araucana breed of chickens can even have earlobes that are a pale green or blue colour. Sure enough, they lay eggs of the corresponding hue.”-Joe Schwarez, McGill University, April 19, 2019

The chicken shown above has a bright white earlobe, indicating that she lays white eggs.

Photo by Frances Gunn on Unsplash

From potatoes to chickens and fields of grass to swampland, the United States has some varied and amazing types of agriculture and farming. These practices are hard work, take lots of dedication, and are vital to keeping our bellies full.