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Making the grade: off-grade potatoes now have a home thanks to Keystone dehydrator plant.

Article Excerpt
Standing in a steady drizzle under a steel-gray October sky, Cory Schlegel and several other men are peering at the gauges on a control panel, trying to find the kink that has interrupted the flow of gas under the road to the new Keystone Potato Products plant. The huddle takes place on a giant landfill, the final resting place for trash from all over the Northeast. Decomposing garbage is the source for the methane gas that provides fuel for the steam Keystone needs to process fresh spuds into 40-pound bags of dehydrated potato flakes.

The culprit for the power interruption ultimately proves to be a defective switch that shut down one of the blowers that drive methane gas into and through the underground pipeline that leads to the plant, located near the town of Hegins in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania.

When the methane gas system shuts down, the plant's back-up propane burners kick on, so the potatoes keep rolling. "But we hate to have to use the propane because of the higher cost," explains Schlegel, the plant's general manager. Indeed, it was the availability and economics of a low-cost, waste-to-energy power source that was the lynchpin for getting this $12 million project built.

There's a lot tiding on the outcome of the effort. This plant could play a major role in determining whether Pennsylvania's fresh-market potato industry stabilizes and grows or continues to contract. The Keystone plant--the only one of its kind east of the Mississippi River and outside Maine--was built so that growers here could stop dumping their off-grade potatoes or giving them away for cattle feed.

"For our industry to be viable in fresh markets, we need to have a market for our off-grade potatoes as well," says Keith Masser, president of Pennsylvania Cooperative Potato Growers Inc., one of the nation's oldest co-ops, and the largest of 42 stockholders in the LLC that was formed to build and operate the plant. Masser is also president of the Keystone board and runs his family potato farm and a large packing house (Sterman-Masser) in nearby Sacramento, Pa. Masser is the second biggest stockholder in the LLC.

In the...