Tons Of Potatoes Per Acre Calculator

All you need to do is plug in the number of samples, your area, and percentage of anticipated losses (or whatever factors you use). You won’t have to convert or calculate coefficients by hand anymore. Instead, it’s a matter of mathematics, the kind you learned in school instead of on farm.

To turn a profit, all you have to do is guess right on what’s below ground. What counts isn’t only weight of what comes out of the ground. What counts are how much survives transport to buyer unspoiled.

Why You Should Use the Calculator

The gross yield (the amount dug by the digger) is what most growers begins with. It’s a good starting point; it shows that your fertilizer and irrigation plans paid off. But it is also the most misleading of all your numbers. It contains rock that fell through screen, vines caught in haulm, and tubers covered in soil.

Folks frequently plan for truck capacity using the weight with dirt included. First use the tool to take out the tare, the weight of soil. There are thirty pounds of dirt for every one hundred pounds of potato. Seems like nothing. But you’re paying to haul it anyway. Your real money come down to clean weight.

Second, there is the grade. Misshapen, green, or shriveled potatoes aren’t paid on market, they can actualy cost money to dispose of. Enter your estimate of the percent cull. (This is where the vanity of the gross number gets knocked out.) It’s the number that puts food on table. And it becomes smaller if you’re storing any portion of crop.

Potato storage will reduce their margins. Potatoes are not just potatoes. They’re living things and they breathe, losing moisture in the process. Over the long growing season, there’s normal shrink of around six percent; bad ventilation (or temperature fluctuations) may increases that up to 10 percent or more. That weight dissapears from your scale. So no selling it!

To calculate your final inventory, the calculator adjust your sellable amount for shrink. It takes an educated guess and makes it real. Now you know exactly how much you have, how many truckload, etc. You’ll avoid missing any shipping window or causing chaos at the processor because you thought you had more then you did.

Seed planning is an area where intuition fails. How can you guess the seed rate from some scribbles on paper? It depends off spacing, of course, and size of the seed pieces. Enter that info into the seed-calculator: in-row spacing and average weight of seed piece to get a calculation. Then click “rejects” for a seed-cutting-loss buffer, and another buffer factor to account for gaps where seed might not be used (to avoid overspending on an excess of seed). Typically about 10 percent seems good; more or less depending on crop condition. It will output exactly how many pounds-per-acre to order. No guessing needed.

So what’s a processing or early red compared to a heavy russet storage crop? Those are the kinds of comparisons the reference tables gives us as standards. If your input wildly diverges from expected range, stop and see whether your assumption is correct. It’s a guide; it’s not an absolute truth. But these ranges let you confirm your inputs.

There’s a lot of faith involved in growing potatoes, and precise math in selling them. The weather is beyond your control, yet the math isn’t. Understanding begins by eliminating guesswork from the harvest and separating net marketable tonnage from gross yield. From the first dig through the final sale, you know exactly what you’re dealing with.