Potato production typically entails both greater soil disturbance and higher profits than alternative crops in the regions in which they are grown. This article provides an analysis of economically relevant outcomes from soil health practice trials conducted in potato production systems in four locations across the continental United States from 2019 to 2022. We compare revenue and profit estimates over several soil health-related practices: rotation duration, chemical fumigation, mustard biofumigation, and application of organic amendments. We find that longer rotations are positively correlated with revenues and profits. This finding is robust across a range of tests and several regression specifications, although we do observe some variation across locations. While in our data, 3-year rotations consistently produced better economic outcomes than 2-year rotations, over time periods longer than the 4 years in this study, at least some of the gains associated with longer rotations will be offset by the implied decreased frequency of potato years. We did not find consistent evidence of differences in revenue or profits corresponding to chemical fumigation, mustard biofumigation, or the application of organic amendments.

Manure applied to cropland may serve as a source of weed introduction and dispersal. In 36 manure samples from 20 farms, apparently-viable seeds from 13 grasses and 35 broadleaf plants were found. Common lambsquarters was on more than half the farms, yellow foxtail on 35%, common chickweed and dandelion on 30%, and wild mustard, redroot pigweed, and barnyardgrass on 25%. Four farms had manure with no seeds at all; the remainder averaged 75 100 per 1000 kg manure. Twelve milking-cow and heifer barns on six farms with large velvetleaf infestations also were sampled with an average of 133 000 seeds per 1000 kg manure. Only one barn contained velvetleaf seeds. When compared to soil seedbank numbers, manure is not an important seed source for New York farms. However, problems may arise with imported feeds heavily infested with weed seed or which contain even small numbers of noxious weeds.