Global: Potato Growers Adopt Digital Tools Piece by Piece Rather Than as One Platform
Potato growers are adding digital tools one at a time, from blight alerts to yield maps and store sensors, rather than adopting a single platform.
Potato News Today described digital adoption in potato production in 2025 as happening “field by field, storage by storage”: a weather station on one farm, a yield monitor on another, a storage dashboard elsewhere.
Late blight decision support is one example. In parts of France, growers use web-based platforms that combine weather data with crop development models to recommend fungicide timings and intervals, where products are registered. Commercial platforms combine several disease models and send alerts by app, email or text message.
At harvest, retrofitted yield mapping systems can be installed on existing potato harvesters. The resulting maps show how yield varies across a field, and growers can use them to redesign management zones for future seasons.
In storage, networked sensors placed throughout the store send real-time data to dashboards. Some platforms use these readings to cut unnecessary ventilation, for example running carbon dioxide extraction only when concentrations pass set thresholds.
Processors are building their own data links. An integration lets growers supplying McCain transfer farm and field data, including the season’s application records for nominated fields, from Agworld into the McCain Grower Portal for crop monitoring, contracting, compliance and performance reporting. In 2023 McCain also formed Presia, a unit that uses satellite imagery and machine learning to support crop monitoring and earlier yield estimates.
Several platforms now present themselves as end-to-end data hubs, and integration of field, storage and processing data into single platforms is expected. For now, it is a direction of travel rather than the norm.
Sources: Potato News Today, 2025; Agworld; PotatoPro, 2023
