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Potato Sustainability Alliance releases 2023 report

The Potato Sustainability Alliance has released its North American Potato Sustainability Assessment (PSA) report.

This report is meant to communicate the North American sustainability results & insights gathered from the PSA Program annual on-farm assessment, providing PSA members & participating growers with a valuable benchmark for evaluating their own reports.

The most recent report utilizes data from 420 growers across the U.S. and Canada, who combined represent nearly 590,000 acres. Those growers were invited to complete a self-assessment. Areas were divided into West, Midwest and East. For Canadian regions, Alberta and Saskatchewan were included in the West region (which included 47 growers and 58,346 acres); Manitoba and Ontario in the Midwest (47 growers and 62,080 acres), and New Brunswick and P.E.I. in the East (129 growers, 86114 acres).

Potato growers across the U.S. and Canada achieved an overall performance score of “medium”; of the six sub categories (biodiversity and habitat; community leadership; human and animal health; optimal production; soil health; and water impact) all were assessed at “medium” with the exception of human and animal health, which scored “high.”

In biodiversity and habitat, it was found that 43 per cent of growers “actively maintain or restore cropped and uncropped areas on the farm to improve the quality of habitat for biodiversity,” and 23 per cent of growers “established new habitat or improved the quality of habitat for pollinators in the past three years.” This has been identified as an area for improvement in the report.

By contrast, under human and animal health, nearly 100 per cent of growers “actively communicate in response to questions/complaints concerning operations and product selection (e.g., drift, dust, odor, visual PPE),” and more than half “conduct residue and health risk testing and/or audits and share results with supply chain partners, and others.” The high score, according to the report, reflects the active adoption of numerous key BMPs.

Read the report here.