Why Polish Growers Still Ridge Every Potato Field

Polish potato acreage has fallen from roughly 3 million hectares at its 1960s and 70s peak to under 200,000 hectares today, a footprint now comparable to narrow-leaf lupin cultivation. An analysis in Farmer.pl traces that decline through the decades: about 2 million hectares by the late 1980s and early 1990s, under 1.6 million by 1995, and a leveling-off around 200,000 hectares from roughly 2020 onward.

The most recent season actually ticked upward. Last year's Polish potato area came in at just over 211,000 hectares — about 20,000 hectares more than 2024 and roughly 30,000 more than 2023. The piece is careful to frame this not as a sign of collapse but of consolidation: a growing share of the remaining acreage sits with highly specialized farms investing in modern technology, producing high-quality raw material for food processing rather than a generic commodity crop.

Despite everything else that has changed in potato production, cultivation on ridges — redliny, in Polish agronomic terms — has stayed constant. The technique has been used for centuries because potatoes do well on them, and forming a ridge loosens the soil heavily while its shape helps the soil warm.

Ridging later in the season, not just at or before planting, also lets growers correct ridge shape to reduce unwanted greening of tubers exposed to light. Tubers held above the surrounding field level can send roots down into soil moisture without sitting in conditions prone to rot, and a well-formed ridge simply gives more physical room for tubers to develop.

Ridging doubles as a mechanical weeding pass, destroying weeds both on the ridges and in the furrows between them. Potatoes are described as particularly vulnerable to weed pressure during their slow early growth stage, and the source lists a long roster of species that threaten young plantings, including common chickweed, field violet, fat hen, field bindweed, wild radish, and annual meadow-grass among many others.

The effectiveness of mechanical weeding through ridging is estimated broadly, and roughly, at 45 to 98 percent — a wide range reflecting that this is never a single pass but a repeated operation, sometimes supplemented with light tine harrowing to knock out weeds on ridge tops. Even the top end of that range falls short of complete control, which is why mechanical weeding is frequently combined with a herbicide treatment rather than relied on alone.

Ridges can be built several ways. Some operations form them before planting, typically when a stone-separating machine sifts the soil and heaps it into finished ridges, which then requires a specialized planter suited to that pre-formed shape. More commonly, the planter itself forms the ridge — sometimes a simple mound needing further ridging afterward, sometimes a final shape depending on the equipment used.

Where ridging is done as a standard, repeated operation, the appropriate window runs from emergence up to the point where the pass would damage the plants. Depending on the technology chosen, that can mean a single ridging pass followed by a herbicide treatment, or, in more ecologically oriented systems, ridging repeated as often as weekly. Passive implements are the norm for building ridges, though active ridge formers are used on heavier soils where clod formation is a risk — a less common setup simply because potato production on such heavy sites is itself less common.