United Fresh Potato Growers of Colorado

UFPG/CO MADE SIMPLE !

The United Fresh Potato Growers of Colorado (UFPG/CO) may sound complicated, but it can be summed up with a few words: Neighbors Working Together. Of course you have questions, and some will be answered below.

COST: About a half-penney for each cwt. Where does that come from? Currently the annual assessment is $2 per acre of potatoes. If you produce 400 cwt/acre, that figures out 1/2 cent per cwt. Compare to $8 per cwt for seed, fertilizer, chemicals, water, harvest at close to 100 cents per cwt! Sure, we don't need another assessment, and we'd all like to save the money for the huge HDTV, but think of the POSSIBLE RETURN. Every year we gamble a fortune. If this half-penny gamble got you another 50 cents, that's a 100-to-1 return! Or you could tell your banker that you got a 10,000% return on this investment! Where else can you find that kind of return potential!

Initial membership fee is $100 (just one time). Ouch. What do you get for that? YOU GET AS MUCH VOTING POWER AS THE BIGGEST FARMER IN THE UFPG. No bull. Each Coop member gets an equal vote. That's right: the guy with 20 circles gets 1 vote, and the guy with a half circle gets 1 vote. If you're a little guy, that's quite a bargain.

WHAT ABOUT THE GUYS WHO WON'T JOIN? Sure, we all know that some guys won't join. Some guys will want to cheat. Some guys will be ready to stab their neighbors in the back, to undercut and undersell. We’re not stupid. But, try to imagine if 9/10 of the growers were committed to working together. Sure, the buyers are going to buy the cheap spuds first, but unless the non-member is stupid, he might as well raise his price to almost what the members want. (He’ll ride our shirt tails.) If his spuds are as good, he might as well ask as much as everybody else. Nevertheless, if he sells his for a quarter less, he will sell out early, but soon the 1/10 that aren’t signed up will be sold out. Then where will the buyers go? Let’s say 200,000 cwt sell for a quarter less than they might have. Somebody lost $50,000!
What if not that many sign up? What if 1/5 of the spuds sell cheap? The other 4/5 will have to sit in storage a while longer, but it won’t take long before the 1/5 is gone. Meanwhile, the 4/5 of us will need to educate the other 1/5 about how much money they’re throwing away.

It might even happen that some of us get hurt a bit. If there is an oversupply here in Colorado, June might come and some of us might have more potatoes in the cellar than we’re comfortable with. This is when the UNITED part of UFPG needs to kick in. We need to help our neighbors. But it could happen that a guy has to haul 10% of his crop to the dump. However, if he has received 20 or 30% more for what he did sell, he can still smile all the way to the dump.
And there are alternatives to the dump. We’re shopping around. Cattle feed lots out east need spuds. Of course, we have local alternatives like the flake plant. There are government alternatives. We are looking into a fund to cover unsold potatoes. The trick is to try working together.

WE ALL KNOW that raising the grower price a penny a pound won’t have any effect on the amount of potatoes consumed, whether or not the grocery store price even changes. We all know there is potential to make a reasonable profit and to have some stability in our industry.

THE KEY and THE FUTURE are in COOPERATION. We have made efforts like this in the past that have failed. Why now? Because IDAHO is leading the way. The big guys got this started. We are riding Idaho’s coat tails, but we are trying to give them all the support we can.

Try getting out of the rut.

Try cooperating with your neighbors.

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