Because potato growers always needed more land than they owned, they rented extra.

"I'd rather spend time with a potato grower than other chefs," he sniffs.

By some estimates as many as a third of this state's nearly 900 potato growers could go broke within a year.

Yet few groups are as desperate as potato growers.

To remedy the situation, potato growers are trying to band together to cut production levels for the 2001 crop.

But organizing the notoriously independent potato growers is difficult at best.

Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and some other Asian countries are also large sweet potato growers.

In the late 1980s, the lack of financial credit at planting time represented the greatest impediment facing potato growers.

He later moved to Victoria, where he would become Australia's largest potato grower.

He is reputed to be a passionate potato grower, but claims to have a "vegetable patch full of weeds".