 Good morning, everyone. My name is Mark Clampine. I am president and CEO of United Potato Growers of America. And I want to thank Andy Robinson and the folks there at NDSU for having me this morning as part of the podcast series there in the Red River Valley. Well, like everything, we would certainly all like to be together in person. We will make the most of this. So what I want to do this morning is give you a quick overview of the 2021 potato market. We'll do that by taking a look at the varietal supply and price history and the trends in those varieties and take a look at a market outlook with some Red River Valley information included in that. So first of all, just like I always do, we'll start off with the yellow potato category. It's kind of the star, so to speak, of the fresh potato world, certainly in terms of growth rate. And we'll see that here in just a minute. This slide is a look at the 10-year history of fresh yellow potato shipments out of the valley there. You can see going back to 2011, the valley was well below 100,000 hundred weight shipped. And just in 10 years time, what we're now projecting to be 862,000 hundred weight shipped out of the valley there. That's more than a 10-fold increase just in that 10 years time. So a pretty incredible growth rate. A lot of that coming just in the last four years. Now last year certainly was a bit of a more down year compared to the years around it, but as all the growers there in the valley are certainly well aware. Some of that was driven by Mother Nature and the horrendous conditions that you had at harvest time. And so that certainly drove a lot of losses and drove this number down. So we'll see that being even more pronounced in the red shipments out of the valley in a minute when we look at that. So switching now to the overall US fresh yellow shipments, you can see that the trend line is similar to what it was for the Red River Valley. Certainly not quite the exponential growth that the valley had, but pretty consistent and incredible growth rate for yellow potato shipments in the fresh market. You can see back in the early 2010s, we were running between five and six million hundred weight. That growth continued all the way through to where we're now projecting over 10 million hundred weight shipped in the US for yellow potatoes for the first time ever. 10 million seven hundred and forty seven thousand to be exact. Of course, you see that little dip that we looked at the same for the for the valley there from last year. There are a few other areas that were also down a little bit. But again, we picked right up where we left off and that growth rate has continued as it had for the previous eight or nine years. This slide shows the actual yellow potato shipments in the US to date. And then going forward from this point in time, the projected shipments for the remainder of this pack here, the blue bars to the left here, those are the actual weekly shipments and the orange bars to the right are the projected weekly shipments for the rest of this pack here. You'll also notice across the bottom here we've also installed the actual Canadian numbers and the projected Canadian numbers going forward. That's that little small greenish bars on the bottom just to give you kind of a context of how much of this Canada accounts for. Again, the dash line is the last year's shipment numbers and the background is the three year average shipment. So you can see most of the year we've been just like on the previous slide, we've been shipping well above the pace of both last year and the three year average going forward. It's something similar. We're not going to quite hit last year's numbers. This was the spike due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so the retail potato sales just went crazy for a while for about a four to five week period here. So we won't hit those bars, but certainly yellow shipments will remain strong for the remainder of the year. Taking a look at the Red River Valley yellow shipments, you'll see something similar, very heavy shipments in the early part of the year. And going forward, we will start to more closely match the three year average. And again, staying a little bit below last year's number, especially during those four to five weeks of the pandemic onset. But certainly with those extremely heavy shipments in the early part of the year, the shipments will come a little bit more back in line with the three year average. But again, very, very positive situation in the yellow potato market for the shipment numbers and for growers going forward in this year. So just to kind of sum up the yellow potato data, the average 10 year annual growth rate in yellow category is plus 8% per year. That's that slide I showed at the outset of this. And that's a pretty, pretty incredible growth rate when you look at it over a 10 year span, especially when you compare that to two reds and russets. So we'll look at here in a minute. And then you look at last year, the growth rate versus last year was over 13%. So again, last year was a little bit of a dip, but certainly continued growth in this category. And with that supply side increase, we've also seen the demand increase in that equation. And so when you use the bail price as a proxy for a grower return, the 10, 5 pound bail price, it's up in that 16 to 18, maybe even a little bit higher dollar range. And we've talked about this before and the fact that the one difference or one of the differences in the yellow category is that there's no single geographic region that dominates the yellow market like there is in reds where it's the red river valley. And in russets where it's certainly Idaho. These are the three largest players California mostly Kern County, Idaho, San Luis Valley there in Colorado, but, but none of these are are probably more than 10 or 12% of market share and there's a number of other geographic regions right in that same category, including the red river valley. So we've always kind of asked this question, we asked it again last year with that one year growth pause is are we nearing that plateau, where the demand and supply side equation become more in balance. And you start to lose some of that positivity and the return side of the equation. And this year would suggest that with the supply increase we've seen a corresponding demand increase that we haven't quite got there yet but it is always something that we want to keep an eye on because we won't don't want to kind of tip over the back edge of that so to speak and start losing grower return. So let's switch to the red potato category. And I'll start out here, just like we did with the yellow category taking a look at the fresh red potato shipments out of the red river valley you can see the 10 year history here, and kind of keep this this overall trend in and we switch over and look at the total US but you can also see a few dips certainly in the Red River Valley shipments some of that is driven by by acreage certainly over the last few years but also as the growers there are fully fully aware is the Red River Valley is more susceptible than really any other area to mother nature due to the fact that fresh potatoes are mostly grown on dry land there in the valley and so some of these were certainly mother nature throwing curveballs at the valley there but you do see this year bouncing back just slightly over over last year back up to a little over 1.9 million hundred way projected shipments out of the valley that's certainly down from from the peak years back in the mid 2010s but it is up slightly from last year you might think that would be more with the devastation at harvest that you experienced in 2019 but actually the flip side happened this year where there was too dry of conditions in the valley and there was some certainly some losses of acreage there mostly around Grand Forks and South there a little bit because of too dry of conditions and not having the ground condition for harvest. So taking a look at the overall US fresh red potato shipments for the last 10 years you can see that that trend is somewhat similar to what the valleys chart looked like in terms of the kind of the general trend line but going back to the early 2010s and then into the mid 2010s where we kind of hit the peak in fresh red potato shipments in the US a little bit of a plateau and then dropping off here in the last few years this year we're projecting just under 12.5 million hundred weight total shift in the US that's of course up from last year but again bear in mind last year was a bit of a down years a lot of that being driven by what happened there in the valley. So looking at the overall red potato shipments for this year you can see again just like in yellows the blue bars to the left are our actual shipments to date and orange bars going forward are projected shipments. So we've gone along here somewhat above last year's numbers but more or less kind of on the three year average and going forward taking out this big spike again for the beginning of the COVID pandemic where we saw that rush on retail the same thing happened with red potatoes. Other than that we're going to probably track somewhat similar to last year's numbers but bear in mind you as you can see in this chart most of those bars are well below the three year average so again reflecting that overall lower number from from two or three years ago. And in the valley specifically you can see the shipment patterns for this year so far shipping certainly above last year's numbers in a lot of weeks but certainly well below the three year average line and going forward for a number of weeks to come here in the near future. We're expecting to be well below not only three year average the last year's numbers when we saw that spike at the onset of the again the onset of the pandemic where the big rush happened to retail for fresh potatoes which also included red potatoes. Then in kind of the April timeframe we start to get a little bit above last year's as the shipments are going to be spread out a little further towards the end of this year but again still well below those three year average numbers that you see here. Kind of summing up the red potato supply data that average 10 year growth rate is actually turned slightly negative it's now negative 0.9%. The major 2020 shifts in the crop the Red River Valley there as you saw with the numbers is going to be up about 5%. Big Lake and Central Minnesota there they had a big crop and they were up substantially 30% over the previous year Colorado and Wisconsin up 18 and 20% respectively. The other major red players Idaho Florida the Skagit Valley there Northwest Washington and Texas were essentially flat to last year in terms of shipment volumes. Canada for their 2020 crop imports to the US we expect them to be down 20% in total by the end of this year. They're not quite at that level now but we don't expect that shipping pace of really all of their fresh potatoes coming down to to to maintain as it did for the early part of this crop year so overall we expect them to be down 20%. And in terms of pricing the red price has really been what I would suggest to be more stable than it has in previous time frames and by that I mean less affected by supply shifts really than ever before. Some of that we certainly attribute to the utilization of market information provided by by our organization as well as the grower collaboration that our organization facilitates. So we really see some positives from that and being reflected in the stability of that that red pricing and again using that bail price as a proxy for return. It's probably right now in that $13 or so range for for a 10 five pound bail switching gears again to Russet potatoes just to finish this out and I won't spend much time here because it's of less importance to the valley. This is the 10 year shipment chart for the total US for fresh Russet potatoes and you can see that the trend line here would certainly be in a downward direction from 10 years ago although you could say that the last three years have been somewhat stable. Yet we are going to only for the second time ever ship below 70 million hundred weight in the US for Russets at just below 69.9 million hundred weight. And with that I will close out you can see our information there on the screen and I'll just thank you all again for having me this morning everyone have a great day.