Netherlands: Potato farm prices fall by almost twelve percent

The consumer price index for potatoes reached 122 points in March 2025. That is almost one percent higher than in January 2025 and more than two percent higher than in March 2024. The price index for the processing industry reached 161 points in March 2025, the same as at the beginning of this year and approximately one percent higher than the same month last year.

Consumer Price Index

The consumer price index for potatoes reached 122 points in March. This is almost one percent higher than at the beginning of this year and more than two percent higher than in March 2024. The stabilization around this price level is comparable to last year and is related to the seasonal pattern, with consumer prices often showing a slightly downward trend after the harvest at the end of the summer and rising again from May-June when stocks slowly run out and storage costs are higher. This trend shows that the consumer price index follows the upward trend in farm gate prices with a small delay and a strongly dampened effect.

Farm prices

The upward trend in the farm gate price index has been reversed. The price level in March 2025 of 184 points shows a decrease of almost 12 percent compared to January and is therefore around the level of October 2024. Where the previous update spoke of an upward price as a result of limited supply in a strong demand market due to somewhat disappointing harvest yields in 2024 and lower kilos of stock potatoes, we now see that the demand for potatoes has fallen.

The cause of this is a combination of expectations of a larger and earlier harvest and disappointing French fry sales, which is why the processing industry is focusing on contract potatoes and does not need potatoes from the free market. Whether the positive expectations for the coming season will come true is increasingly uncertain given the ongoing drought. If May is as dry as March and April, this will have a negative impact on the potato harvest and affect the price level. Due to the dry spring, many growers planted early and the first early potato harvest already took place in the Netherlands at the beginning of May.

Potato harvest 2024

The total production of the Dutch consumption potato harvest in 2024 will amount to 3.3 million tonnes. This is lower than the 3.6 million tonnes that Statistics Netherlands had mentioned in October in the preliminary harvest estimate . Harvests were smaller than in 2023, despite the area having grown by 3.5 percent to almost 80,000 ha. In total, approximately 50,000 tonnes less was harvested in 2024 than in 2023, mainly because the yields per hectare lagged behind.

On average, 43.3 tonnes of consumption potatoes were harvested per hectare. That is 3.4 percent lower than in 2023 and 7.7 percent lower than the five-year average. The larger area could not compensate for the decline in yield per hectare.

Strong demand for agricultural land

The expectation is that there will continue to be increasing pressure on the supply side of potatoes, especially in the Netherlands and Belgium. This pressure is caused by the strong demand for agricultural land (partly for other activities), stricter regulations, sustainability requirements from processors and supermarkets and climate change leading to extreme weather conditions, salinization and higher disease pressure.

On the other hand, the area has been expanded mainly in France and Germany, which leads to a total area expansion of seven percent to approximately 560,000 ha in these four countries. The area expansion is necessary to meet the increasing demand for raw materials from the new French fry factories in Northern France. In this way, the French potato cultivation and industry is responding to the growing global demand for industrial potatoes in particular from the catering and fast food sectors in emerging economies.

Processing industry

As a result, the yield price of the processing industry has shown an upward trend since the beginning of 2022. The price index of the processing industry in the Netherlands reached a level of 161 points in March 2025, the same as January 2025 and more than one percent higher than the same month last year when the price index was at 159 points. In addition to the growing demand, the higher production costs such as those for seed potatoes and machine maintenance also play a role in the upward price trend. The expectation is therefore that the industry price will remain high.

The potato processing industry processed a mere 3.9 million tonnes of potatoes over the past 12 months (March 2024 – March 2025), according to processing figures published by the Association for the Potato Processing Industry. This is almost the same as the level of the same period last year (more than 3.9 million tonnes).