potatoes.meWhy Potato Storage Season Never Really Ends
Potato storage quality is decided long before the season's problems become visible — the case a recent storage webinar makes by walking through curing, airflow, sprout suppression and sanitation as one continuous discipline rather than separate, isolated tasks.
- 2Storage experts featured in the webinar
- 4Sprout suppression tools discussed (CIPC, DMN, SmartBlock, 1-octanol)
- 3End-use markets covered — processing, fresh market, seed
Storage Now Starts Before Harvest Ends
A webinar replay hosted by NAPSO and Spud Smart makes a simple but easy-to-overlook point: the condition of stored potatoes months from now is being set right now, through decisions on curing, airflow and sanitation made before the bins are even full. The session frames storage turnover — the transition from filling a facility to actively managing it through the season — as a continuous discipline rather than a single event at the end of harvest.
That framing matters because storage losses are rarely traced back to a single failure. A soft spot in curing practice, a gap in temperature monitoring, or a delayed sanitation pass can compound over months of holding, showing up later as shrink, disease pressure or quality downgrades that are much harder to trace back to their origin once they surface.
Two Voices, One Toolkit
The webinar features Tyson Arnold of Industrial Ventilation and Nathan Gelles of DECCO Post-Harvest, who walk through the practical mechanics of long-term storage: temperature, humidity and airflow management, plus the sprout suppression toolkit growers currently have available — CIPC, DMN, SmartBlock and 1-octanol are all named as options discussed in the session.
Listing four distinct sprout suppression chemistries side by side signals something about where the industry currently sits: there is no single default product anymore. Growers and storage managers are choosing between tools with different modes of action and application timing, which raises the operational bar for storage monitoring and record keeping — another topic the session covers directly.
Reading the toolkit list: Naming four distinct sprout suppression chemistries rather than one standard product suggests growers now face a genuine selection decision, not a default choice — which raises the stakes on the monitoring and record-keeping practices covered in the same session.
Sanitation and the Ring Rot Risk
Alongside airflow and sprout control, the webinar addresses storage sanitation protocols and, specifically, the risk of bacterial ring rot. Placing ring rot management inside a routine storage-turnover conversation — rather than treating it as a standalone crisis topic — is itself notable. It positions disease prevention as a built-in part of everyday storage operations, not a response reserved for after an outbreak is already detected.
Disease prevention as routine, not emergency: Folding bacterial ring rot risk into a general sanitation and turnover discussion — rather than a standalone alert — implies the intended posture is continuous prevention built into normal storage operations.
One Session, Three Markets
The replay is pitched at growers storing potatoes for processing, fresh market or seed alike. That cross-market framing underscores how much of the core storage discipline — curing, airflow, sanitation, turnover timing — is shared infrastructure regardless of what the crop is destined for, even though the value at stake (and the tolerance for defects) differs sharply between a processing lot and certified seed stock.
The session closes by tying the current storage season directly to preparation for the next one, treating end-of-season facility readiness as part of the same continuous cycle rather than a separate task to revisit closer to next harvest.
Storage losses compound quietly over months, and by the time rot, sprouting or quality downgrades surface, the decisions that caused them were often made weeks or months earlier — making proactive turnover management a margin issue, not just a housekeeping one.
What sprout suppression tools were discussed in the webinar?
The session covers four options: CIPC, DMN, SmartBlock and 1-octanol, alongside broader temperature, humidity and airflow management practices.
Does the webinar apply to seed potato storage as well as processing and fresh market?
Yes — the replay is framed as relevant to growers storing potatoes for processing, fresh market or seed.
Who presented the storage webinar?
Tyson Arnold of Industrial Ventilation and Nathan Gelles of DECCO Post-Harvest presented, covering topics from curing and airflow to sanitation and bacterial ring rot risk.
Tyson Arnold, Industrial Ventilation · Nathan Gelles, DECCO Post-Harvest
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