Despite 2023 harvest failure, more potatoes in Belgium

According to the final harvest estimate of the statistics agency StatBel, the Belgian potato harvest in 2023 will amount to 4.0 million tonnes. This concerns the main harvest, but also the early potatoes and seed potatoes. Earlier this year it was already announced that around 400,000 tonnes of potatoes remained in the ground because it was too wet to harvest them. Despite the large amount of potatoes that remained in the ground, the harvest was 444,000 tonnes larger than in 2022. The difference is caused by a larger area and higher yields. In 2022, the yield of storage potatoes remained at only 39.4 tonnes per hectare due to drought. According to the final estimate, the 2023 harvest yielded 42.8 tonnes per hectare of storage potatoes. That is 1.7 tonnes more than the average of the past seven years. In addition, the surface area of potatoes that went into storage was one of the largest ever. Only in 2020 was the area slightly larger. Before the extreme ...