European fast-food consumers demand long, straight chips, which means European potatoes need to be sizeable. But this summer, Europe’s weather had other ideas.
A punishing drought meant Dutch farmer Hendrik Jan ten Cate was forced to spray water from a local canal on his potatoes to prevent them shrinking. “Irrigation is very expensive. About 10 per cent of my costs was water this summer,” he says. “Farmers who could not irrigate lost half their harvest.”
Ten Cate’s other outlays were up 25 per cent, he says, because of the high price of gas. Fuel for tractors, fertilisers and pesticides all got more expensive.
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