Jacob Jan van Nieuwenhuis stands to make a killing soon. Or stoops, rather. He's knee-deep in mud right now, digging up potatoes, to see whether he'll harvest a bumper crop in a couple of weeks or lose them all.
The 34-year-old raises potatoes on an island farm just off the Dutch coast. After the rainiest September since 1957, potato prices on the Amsterdam futures market are three times what he usually gets.
"Some of my colleagues have lost 20 percent of their fields to rain," Van Nieuwenhuis said. "I have to wait. I have to hope. I need five or six dry days. But if I can get them out, I can sell them all."
In September alone, spuds gained 96 percent on the Amsterdam market. In October, they hit 29.54 euros (US$27.73) per hundred kilograms -- the highest price in three years.
Good news for Van Nieuwenhuis may be bad news for the Dutch economy. Higher potato prices, which make up 1.4 percent of the country's consumer prices index, could nudge up an inflation rate that, at 5.4 percent, is already the fastest in the EU.
Agriculture accounted for 3.9 percent of the economy last year, compared with 1.8 percent for all the hotels, restaurants and cafes in the country. Before the rain this year, farmers had been hit by bovine spongiform encephalopathy -- mad-cow disease -- and foot-and-mouth disease. The combination could curb agricultural growth, hurting an economy where growth has slowed or remained unchanged for the past six quarters.
Four percent of all Dutch land is planted in potatoes, 16 times more than the famous Dutch tulip. They raised 8.1 million tonnes of spuds last year, compared with 13 million tonnes in Germany, which is nine times bigger. That was 17 percent of EU production and 1 percent of Dutch exports.
"If potato prices go up, it has a very large impact on the Dutch economy," said Harmen Versluis, an economist at Rabobank. "It is an important part of the Dutch diet." The average Dutchman eats 78kg of potatoes a year, compared with 70kg for each German and 65kg per french-fry-eating American. A lot of the spuds get consumed during the winter, when dinner tends to feature hearty, meat-and-potato dishes.
McCain Foods Ltd has already upped its prices. The Canadian company is the world's biggest french-fry maker. Its northern European division provides the fries for all the McDonald's restaurants in the Netherlands, and its frozen fries are now selling for as much as US$0.40 per kilogram more in supermarkets.
"It's going to be a tight market for the rest of the year," said Folkert Sneep, the chief executive of the division. "At least 10 percent of the crop is definitely lost to rot." Weather is the problem. Potatoes should be planted in April, get some rain as they start growing, then sun and a little rain during the summer, before they're harvested in autumn. This year, rain and cold delayed planting. More rain came in September. Potatoes rotted and prices soared.
In Ooltgensplaat, van Nieu-wenhuis's mobile phone rang to give him an update on the day's prices. Eager to see what shape his potatoes were in, he trotted out to the fields.
He was lucky. His 70 hectares of fields are on high ground. Sloshing across the farm, he found his crop is healthy -- so far.
If he gets all his crop in and sold at the early October price of 28 euros per 100kg, he'll net as much as 680,000 euros, according to Bloomberg calculations. His costs haven't risen as much as prices have surged, so he'd make about 10 times the profit he'd get in a normal year.
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