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A french-fry boomtown emerges as a climate winner -- as long as it has water
BUSINESS
A french-fry boomtown emerges as a climate winner — as long as it has water
Climate change has helped a small town become the world capital of french-fry production. But a dwindling water supply could reverse its progress entirely.
By Eli Tan
August 21, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
OTHELLO, Wash. — From miles away, you can smell Othello, an 8,700-person hamlet on the high plains of central Washington. To locals, it smells like home. To anyone else, it’s the smell of french fries.
Othello produces more frozen french fries, hash browns and tater tots than anywhere else in the world — 1.5 billion pounds a year, or 15 percent of North American production. Every 10 minutes for roughly 10 hours a day, a truck carries more than 60,000 pounds of potatoes into town.
Over the next two decades, Othello is positioned to produce even more. The town is abundant with renewable energy and sufficiently far north for its surrounding potato farms to flourish as the Earth grows hotter. Potato manufacturers are betting hundreds of millions of dollars that Othello will be a haven from climate change. ... “Yes, we’re a boomtown,” said Othello Mayor Shawn Logan.
But rapid investment has brought rapid growth, and now — like many places across the American West — Othello is running out of water. Unless local officials can come up with $400 million to pipe water from Columbia River canals to the north, the region’s wells could run dry in as few as five years.
{snip}
By Eli Tan
Eli Tan is a business reporter at The Washington Post. Before The Post, he was a staff writer for CoinDesk, where he covered cryptocurrency and Web3. He lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter https://twitter.com/elitanjourno
A french-fry boomtown emerges as a climate winner — as long as it has water
Climate change has helped a small town become the world capital of french-fry production. But a dwindling water supply could reverse its progress entirely.
By Eli Tan
August 21, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
OTHELLO, Wash. — From miles away, you can smell Othello, an 8,700-person hamlet on the high plains of central Washington. To locals, it smells like home. To anyone else, it’s the smell of french fries.
Othello produces more frozen french fries, hash browns and tater tots than anywhere else in the world — 1.5 billion pounds a year, or 15 percent of North American production. Every 10 minutes for roughly 10 hours a day, a truck carries more than 60,000 pounds of potatoes into town.
Over the next two decades, Othello is positioned to produce even more. The town is abundant with renewable energy and sufficiently far north for its surrounding potato farms to flourish as the Earth grows hotter. Potato manufacturers are betting hundreds of millions of dollars that Othello will be a haven from climate change. ... “Yes, we’re a boomtown,” said Othello Mayor Shawn Logan.
But rapid investment has brought rapid growth, and now — like many places across the American West — Othello is running out of water. Unless local officials can come up with $400 million to pipe water from Columbia River canals to the north, the region’s wells could run dry in as few as five years.
{snip}
By Eli Tan
Eli Tan is a business reporter at The Washington Post. Before The Post, he was a staff writer for CoinDesk, where he covered cryptocurrency and Web3. He lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter https://twitter.com/elitanjourno
