From field to french fry: students tour local potato farm

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Vauxhall Advance

By Cal Braid
Vauxhall Advance
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

On Oct. 21, junior high students from Vauxhall High School made the short trek to Triple M Farms north of Taber for a tour of its huge potato operation. Tamara Miyanaga hosted the group of about two dozen youth as a representative from the family after whom the farm is named. For an hour, her presentation and facility tour covered the history of the farm and the current farming practices that keep their potato production at the top of the heap. Afterwards, she made a beeline back to her day job as reeve for the municipal district.

 As a Caucasian who married into a Japanese farming family, she said, “Japanese people, like most, are very resilient and hard working. They’re going to do whatever it takes. So the Miyanagas ended up buying 80 acres of land, which isn’t very much, and they started their farming operation to the farming operation they are today. So it has been very much a success story.”

 Family is at the centre of the farming operation, and Miyanaga said, “We’re a pretty tight family. One way or the other, we’re always together, because two sisters married two brothers, so we’re very, very close.”

 “Our farm is definitely a working farm. Our primary crop is potatoes, and then we grow grain, and then we work with our neighbours in crop rotation. When you look at the fields outside, you could see that they’re blocked into circles. We call these quarter sections, and underneath each quarter section is 130 acres,” she explained, holding up poster-board drawings as a visual guide. For a size comparison reference, she said that 70 football fields line to line could fit in each of those fields.

 Within each section on the drawings were four circles, representing the circular path that an irrigation pivot travels to water the crop. 

“If you were going to be a dry land farmer or have cattle on it, it would be 160 acres,” she said, noting that the corners of each section contain 30 additional acres to the crop that grows under the irrigation water.

 “I know if you’re from Vauxhall, you’ve seen that watering system. We could not grow potatoes in southern Alberta without water, and we have irrigation,” she told the group. This year, those north of the Oldman River didn’t have a shortage of water, but those south of it had a limit on how much they could apply to their crops.

 “Potatoes require approximately 90 swimming pools worth of water for that crop for the full year,” she said. “On these four sections, we never grow potatoes the same year after year. If you did that, the soil will get tired and old and have disease. So we make sure that we rotate. So in year one, we grow potatoes; year two, we could grow a grain; year three could be sugar beets or onions; and then year four, back to grain. All of these crops add different things to the soil to make that soil a healthier environment to grow.”

 “We make sure that we apply the water as carefully as we can,” she explained further, telling the students that the systems are regulated by computers that account for high and low-lying spots on the land and make automatic adjustments to the irrigation. “It’s very controlled. In southern Alberta, we used to have lots of open canals. More and more they’re being converted to pipelines, and that allows us to save more water so that it doesn’t evaporate.”

 Miyanaga made the tour instantly relatable by invoking the world’s most famous fast food chain and pointing to a massive pile of millions of pounds of potatoes in a darkened bin behind her. “Anyone ever go to McDonald’s?” she asked. “So in the world, 69 million people every day go to McDonald’s and eat nine million pounds of potatoes. So our bin of eight million pounds of potatoes could not feed the world for their fry order for one day.”

  She introduced her father-in-law Bob, who vouched for the technical advancements that have developed over his many years of farming. He said that when he began, all one needed was working hands and a strong back to start farming, but that has given way to specialization and expertise. “You can’t do that anymore. It’s way too technical,” he said. “There’s way too much involvement with chemicals. seed, soil preparation. You can’t just go out and grow potatoes. They want to know what chemical was in the field before that for two years.”

 “It’s a good life. You start small, and you just keep building. You build and you think you’re the boss, but you’ve got to have a lot of good people helping.” And his family’s operation definitely requires many hands.

 “He’s very modest,” his daughter-in-law said. “He is still helping us make decisions so we value the knowledge that he brings to our farm. We couldn’t do it without his brother, Uncle John and Grandpa Bob. We wouldn’t be a successful farm without what they brought to us.”

 Miyanaga took the group to another dark building full of potatoes where a long conveyor on wheels butted up against the pile. At intervals along the sheet metal siding, temperature sensor wires were mounted and strung through the pile, and metal pipes were run underneath the potatoes every 20 feet, pumping in hot or cold air to manage the humidity.

 “That’s so that the potatoes are stored at the temperature that it’s like if they were in the ground, and obviously not in the ground frozen, but like in August, September, when the ground is ideal,” Miyanaga said. “So we have a very temperature controlled environment. When we’re not shipping, there’s nothing else in the bin and just the potatoes. We also don’t like to leave lights on. We just did that for you guys, because if the light is on the potatoes, they can turn green, and then they’re no good for processing.”

 Triple M grows potatoes for solely french fries now and has moved out of the potato chip market. 

“We made a decision that we’d rather just focus on one specific type of potato to have success in what we do. And sometimes, if you are focused on one thing, you can do a little bit better, or you just don’t have those other complications,” she said,

 The farm grows specifically for its contracts, so it knows how much to grow and how much it’s going to store. It works closely with the Potato Growers of Alberta who helps them bargain for the contract price, so the farm doesn’t work individually with the plants; its contract is set through the PGA.

 She told the group that almost immediately after the tour, the potatoes in that bin would begin to roll out on the conveyor to the trucks for delivery. Numerous trucks would be loading up and moving out to the processing plant for immediate use.

 “It’s the day that the potatoes arrive,” Miyanaga said. “They’re processed within the hour and flash frozen. There’s a whole process there that might be better asked of a Lamb-Weston or McCain, but there’s no potatoes there that are just waiting to be processed days later. We haul to be processed that day, and so if we haul this load and they didn’t fry the way they wanted, they would say we don’t want those potatoes, you’ll have to bring those another day. It could be because the potatoes in this bin aren’t the right temperature, or they came from a field that had too much water. There’s all kinds of circumstances that could change how those potatoes fry.”

 All in all, the scale of the Triple M operation was a little astonishing, and by the time it was over and the students were picking a take-home bag of potatoes from the eight million pound pile, it was an hour’s worth of education that was well spent.