-Who is J.R. Simplot? What connection does J.R. Simplot have to the fast food industry?
According to the book, J.R. Simplot was born in 1909. His family left Dubuque, Iowa the follwing year and ecentually settled in Idaho. Simplot dropped out of school at the age of 15, when he was in eighth grade. He sorted potatoes with a "shaker sorter," nine to ten hours a day for 30 cents an hour. He then bought a rifle, which he used to shoot wild horses. He skinned them, and sold their hides for two dollars each. He also cooked the meat and fed it to his hogs, that he sold in the spring for $12.50 a head. At the age of sixteen, he became a potato farmer.
Simplot had a connection to the fast food industry in a number of ways. He started his own potato sorting buisness in his cellar in Declo. After that, he came up with a method for trying potatoes. He became one of the principle suppliers of food to the American military during World War II. By 1944, Simplot had his own company at the calswell plant with about twelve hundred workers. By the end of the war, Simplot was growing his own potatoes, fertilizing them with his own phostphate, shipping them in boxes from his lumber yards, and feeding the scraps to his cattle. Later, Simplot came out with a method to the mass production of frozen french fires, which eventually led to Simplot selling his frozen french fries to fast food restaraunts around the country. Due to his huge invention of keeping frozen french fries tasting fresh, Americans went from eating about eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and fours pounds of french fries a year, to eating about forty-nine pounds of fresh potatoes, and almost thirty pounds of french fries a year. Ninety percent of those were fries purchsed from fast food restaraunts.
-How have potato farms in Idaho changed in the last 25 years or so?
The author states that since 1980, the tonnage of potatoes grown in Idaho has almost double, while the average yield per acre has risen by nearly thirty percent. But the extraordinary profits being made from the sale of french fries have bearly trickled down to the farmers. The current market for potatoes was desrcribed as an "oligopsony," by Paul Patterson, an extention professor of the agricultural economics at the University of Idaho. The increased productivity of Idaho farmers has lowered the prices of the fries even further, shifting more of the profits to the fast food chains. Out of every $1.50 spent on a large order of friens at a fast food resatraunt, 2 cents goes to the farmer who grew the potatoes. This is pressuring the Idaho potato farmers to either get bigger, or get out of buisiness. There was then a new machine manufactured in Idaho by a company called Spudnik, to harvest potatoes. It could set a farmer back hundreds of thousands of dollars. Over the past twenty-five years, Idaho has lost about half o fits potato farmers.
