The Successors is a RealAgriculture podcast series hosted by Kara Oosterhuis focusing on agriculture from the perspective of the up-and-coming generation.
If you sit down and talk to many of our parents and grandparents, they will remember harvesting potatoes from the garden growing up, and getting rid of the small, undersized potatoes.
Flash forward to 2014, and Little Lake Farms Ltd., based out of Burdett, Alta., decided they were going to base their farming operation around the very thing that used to be considered not sufficient enough: little potatoes.
Niek Lamberts, the eldest successor of the Southern Alberta operation, joins the latest episode of The Successors podcast to give us some insight into the potato industry, growing potatoes for The Little Potato Company, what equipment is required, opportunities in the industry, and some of the struggles they face year to year.
Lamberts also gets into the depth of storage, as he notes in the conversation below, that potato storing season is almost as important as the growing season. Because, “if you can’t store a potato, there’s no point in growing a potato.”
When it comes to the future of the farm, Lamberts says his family — which includes his fiancé, Mom, Dad, and younger brother — have a solid vision of where they want to be in the future.
“My brother and I, we kind of know where we want to be going forward,” he explains. “My Mom and Dad are slowing down. But I think they also still want to be involved, because the farm kind of grew so fast. By no means are they at a point where they need to jump out of it, but they do realize that there has to be a future for my brother and I.”
Listen on for a conversation on the joys of putting a crop in the ground, keeping it together in the busy season, the importance of education, and more:
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