Exeter native earns Young Farmer nod

By Anthony Brino

Staff Writer

In the Maine Potato Board’s annual tradition touting the next generation, Ryan Crane from Exeter has been named the Young Farmer of the Year, and is being held up as a model for managing a large, rotating potato operation.

Crane is production manager at Crane Brothers Farms, a 3,000 acre potato business, and he “exemplifies both the tradition of farming passed down through four generations and a passion for maintaining a cutting edge position,” the board said in a statement.

Crane  is “an excellent representative of the future of the Maine potato industry,” said Maine Potato Board executive director Don Flannery.

Crane grew up working on the farm in Exeter, went to Dexter Regional High School and then headed to the Midwest, earning an agricultural economics degree from Purdue University in Indiana in 2008.

Today Crane is back at Exeter, overseeing planning for the main crop of potatoes, largely sold to to Frito Lay for chips, along with rotating crops like corn, rye and oats on 700 acres in the Androscoggin Valley in western Maine, 700 acres around Lincoln and 1,600 acres in Exeter. Having that geographic spread lets the farm have a hedge against bad weather, pests or market swings, and “the ability to use the same equipment across more acres and a longer cropping season,” Crane said in a media release.

Crane’s family has been growing potatoes since the 1940s, selling chip spuds since the 1960s and using rotational crops for just as long, predominantly corn. The family has also been active in potato trade organizations — his uncle, Steve Crane, was 2012 president of the National Potato Council — which has given the younger Crane an appreciation for the influence of food markets and government policy in how farmers end up getting paid.

“In order to sustain our Maine potato industry, we need to be aware and ahead of changing regulations and best practices in production and storage,” said Crane, who takes the Young Farmer’s hat from Robert Irving, a Washburn native noted for using GPS and X-ray equipment on his 1,300 farm in Caribou.

Both are among farmers under 40 being promoted by the Maine Potato Board, amid the aging ranks of the state’s potato farmers, several of whom are lost every few years due to retirement, change in occupation or death.