Nearly 500 barrels of sweet potatoes had been shipped to Northern markets at 2 o’clock Saturday. All of these potatoes were from Currituck County. One hundred and nine barrels were shipped on Friday and 300 had been loaded at 11 o’clock Saturday.
“Prospects as to prices are the best I have ever seen,” N. Howard Smith said Saturday afternoon. “The best grade of potato is bringing $10 a barrel on the Northern market. It is my opinion tha the market will remain high if the farmers will keep the trash off the market. But if the poor grade potatoes are shipped in any large quantity, the market is sure to drop and if it ever gets down it will be hard to bring it up again. The price paid for the poorer grade of potato is exceptionally low this year.”
“I can see no reason why there should be any rush of the potato to the market,” S.G. Scott of Brock & Scott said Saturday morning. “Sweet potatoes next week will be in better condition than they are this week, but I do not think they will be properly developed until week after next. The Eastern Shore potatoes will not get to the market before the 20th of August, and shipments from every state South of us are extremely light except in Alabama and the quantity of potatoes moving from that state is averaging only a few cars a day. If sweets are graded and dug after they are mature I believe the market will bring an average price of $6 a barrel for the next two weeks, but if farmers continue to dig potatoes before they are mature and rush them to market before grading them, you may look for a slump in the market.”
J.B. Owens, former Currituckian who still spends a considerable part of his time in that county, says that the sweet potato acreage is about 30 per cent less than last year. “But prospects are that the total shipments will be greater as last year only half of some of the crops were dug. The farmers in Currituck this year, on an average, will raise practically enough corn for their own needs. Cotton has been planted, too, and the Currituck crop, I believe, has a better color than that of Pasquotank. The farmers of Currituck last year, after losing heavily on sweet and Irish potatoes, made up their minds that they would not again put all their money crop acreage on Irish and sweet potatoes.”
Former Sheriff Bob Griggs of Harbiner, himself a large potato grower, who shipped the first potatoes from Currituck last year, is in no such hurry this year, believing that the market will hold up, if the farmers will grade their potatoes and keep trash off the market, for several weeks yet. Last year Mr. Griggs shipped 30 barrels on August 19 that sold at $10 a barrel and on august 25 shipped more than 100 barrels which sold at $7 a barrel. Beginning early, Mr. Griggs was able to dispose of most of his crop before ethe price got so low as to make shipping unprofitable, whereas most growers left half their potatoes in the ground for the hogs to harvest and in isolated instances less than 10 per cent of the crop was dug. This year, however, Mr. Griggs has not yet dug his first potatoes, a reporter for The Advance learned while the former sheriff was in the city Saturday.
Though believing that prospects indicate a fair yield of potatoes this year if rains do not become excessive, Mr. Griggs thinks that the acreage this year has been greatly overestimated in newspaper reports and by the public generally. He thinks that this year’s sweet potato acreage is hardly more than half and perhaps little over a third of last year’s. “In some instances, growers planted only one barrel of potatoes this year to 10 last year,” he said.
The loss in potato acreage is offset by the gain in cotton acreage, according to Mr. Griggs. He says that 10 acres of cotton this year is planted to one last year and that the crop gives promise of being the biggest and best in Currituck’s history.
From the front page of the Daily Advance, Elizabeth City, N.C., Saturday, July 28, 1923
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