Potato Grower

The smile, even if it's subtle, rarely leaves its home directly below Ed Starkel's snow-white mustache, which is somehow both bushy and immaculately groomed. He is a man who takes his job as a seed potato grower and steward of the land very seriously, but who could never be accused of taking himself too seriously. "We've always worked hard on this farm," Starkel says. "But it's important to take time to slow down and smell the roses a little bit." Indeed, there are an abundance of metaphorical roses to be smelled around Starkel's farm near Polson, Mont. Even shrouded in a smoky haze from a massive late-summer wildfire in nearby Glacier National Park, northwestern Montana's Mission Valley is one of the prettiest places you could imagine putting a farm. Starkel is a native son to this country, and it is just as much a part of him as he is a part of it. Ed Starkel grew up the seventh of 12 children in a farming family in Ronan, Mont., about a half-hour drive from his current farm. The family started raising seed potatoes in 1960, and young Ed got the itch. Once he received his undergraduate degree in 1973, his father offered him a job back on the home place, and he snatched up the opportunity. While all seven of the Starkel boys were intimately involved in the potato industry as adults, only Ed and his younger brother Roger—Ed's neighbor down the road— are still in the business. "I grew up in the spud business," Ed says. "When I was younger, it was always my plan to come back and farm. I just love raising potatoes." When their father retired in 1985, Ed and Roger took over the farming operation. That first year in the boss's chair was, to put it lightly, a challenge. Many of the family's longtime customers— commercial growers in the Columbia Basin—were also retiring from the farm game, and several fell by the wayside during the transition. So the Starkel brothers hit the road. "Roger and I put together a pamphlet and made a trip out to Washington," Ed says. "We just started knocking on doors, showing commercial growers our program. Before long, we had our own customer base." It wasn't just marketing their seed crop that gave the Starkels trouble. Mother Nature can be fickle in the Flathead country, and she had a lesson to teach the young growers. Story and photos by Tyrell Marchant Grower of the Month Ed & Kyle Starkel of Polson, Mont. 20 POTATO GROWER | DECEMBER 2018

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