M A R C H 2 0 1 8 POTATO GROWER 19 Turning Back The Clock A Look Back 25 Years Ago at Excerpts from The March 1993 Issue of The Valley Potato Grower Magazine Testing Lab Opens In Hoople, North Dakota A new ag testing lab opened this season in a high potato production region of the Red River Valley as a service to area potato growers. Farm-Tech has been doing sugar testing for potato growers in the Hoople, North Dakota area this past fall and winter, an enterprise started by a couple well known to area farmers, Linda and Art Duff. The couple got the idea for an ag testing lab last summer from their potato growing friends. Area farm- ers, many of whom are chip grow- ers, were having their chip tests done at the USDA Potato Research Lab in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, a sixty somemile jaunt. They voiced a need to have such a service closer by, so the Duffs started their busi- ness. The process for testing is quite sim- ple, Linda said. She extracts the juice from eight to 12 potatoes with a juicer and puts the juice into a machine which does the rest. Chipping potatoes should have 1 mg/g or less of sucrose and 0.04 per- cent or less glucose. Any expertise she needs she gets from Dr. Joe Sowokinos and his staff at the Potato Research Lab in East Grand Forks. Sowokinos is a research scientist with the Department of Horticultural Science at the University of Minnesota. Duff credits Sowokinos and mem- bers of Frito-Lay for encouraging her to open her business. Frito-Lay is planning to quit offering its test- ing service sometime soon so Farm- Tech provides a valuable benefit. Sowokinos said data gleaned from the chemical maturity monitoring test help farmersmake marketing and harvest decisions. The three times Sowokinos recom- mends testing are to determine the harvest order of fields, early storage for proper temperature and sir flow management to remove excess sugar and long-term storage to determine which bins will hold best for long-term stoarge. By this spring Linda hopes to expand the business to include a soil testing expert. She said current- ly growers have to travel to get soils sample results. She wants to hire an agronomist and offer the results in- house. She is convinced it would be a good business venture. Put Insulation Place ad from page 14 of Janaury 2018 issue here