Five Minutes With…
Mary Hasenoehrl, Idaho Potato Commissioner What’s your background, your education, that kind of thing? My background has always been in agriculture. I grew up on a small farm in Midvale, Idaho. I raised sheep, and when I graduated from high school, I had about 70 head of registered Suffolk. I went to college and became a respiratory therapist. I did that for probably only two or three years and decided that I didn’t always like being on call. I wanted to be a little more flexible. Then I went into public relations, and as I said, I’ve always been involved in farming. I have a dryland farm up north in Idaho around Highway 12 between Orofino and Lewiston. We sell mostly to Bureau of Land Management, forest service, that type of thing, after forest fires go through. I’m a partner with about four other growers. We started a grass seed company called Clearwater Seed. We harvest the grass and sell it to Clearwater Seed. They clean it, blend it and market it. That part of it. And my husband, Doug, is owner of a potato farm. He has had his farm for 50 years. I partner with him on about 60 acres of fresh potatoes. The fresh potatoes go to Arrowhead. We’re fortunate for our climate because we’re one of the first fresh potatoes to reach the shed.
What advice do you have for growers competing in today’s market? You always need to have at least a 10-year plan. You have to be thinking in the future in this day and time because you might have one good year, and if you spend all that money in that year, you’re not going to survive as a farmer. You need to make sure you always have enough set aside for at least five years in your finances.
Tell us something about yourself that people might find surprising. I like to ride bicycles, road bikes. I have done several weeklong bike rides.
When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? When I was a child, I actually wanted to be a nurse. That was what I wanted to do, was become a nurse or a doctor. And then, as I said, I worked in the medical field for a while, and I decided it just… somebody always has to be there, holidays or whatever.
Stay at hotels? I like to camp. I participate in organized trips where someone picks up all my gear, and then when I get to the next spot, it’s all there.
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Potato Country
November 2018
What’s your favorite potato dish? A plain old Idaho baked potato. What’s on your bucket list? On my bucket list is actually to do some mission work. Go to some area – it might be in the United States, it might be in some foreign country – and help however I can, whether it’s re-building after floods or whatever. I would like to do that. For your church? It doesn’t have to be for my church; it could be for any organization, Red Cross, whatever. It’s something I’ve always kind of wanted to do, but I’ve just never had time. Do you have a personal motto or mantra? Never stop learning.
What’s the most unusual or interesting job you’ve ever had? You know, I think it has to be being a female farmer. It’s unusual. What has been the most important innovation you have witnessed? You know, it’s hard to say. Anything that makes our job easier and more productive, and there are so many things that have done that in the last 50 years. We used to dig potatoes and sack them, put them in sacks so there was a lot of handling. Now that’s all mechanical. The potatoes are dug; you dig six or eight rows of potatoes at a time. You never touch them. Yeah, it goes into the truck, it goes into storage. Storage has been phenomenal. Used to be, you had to sell your potatoes; the most you could probably store them is three or four months. Now we’ve stored potatoes up to a year. If Hollywood made a movie of your life, who would you like to see cast as you? Sandra Bullock If you had to eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be? It would be halibut and a baked potato. I love baked potatoes. Do you have any sports teams you follow? The Detroit Lions Okay, that’s an interesting one. And you laugh when you say that because it is hard to be a Lions fan.