Bigfork woman helps family's potato business thrive

In 1982, two seniors at Montana State University started dating. They had known of each other growing up in the Mission Valley. She was from Bigfork and he came from Pablo, but it wasn’t until college that they met.

The next year, Roger Starkel and Kathy Ross would get married and begin their life and business together. “It’s been nothing but fun since,” Roger said.

The Starkels have been leaders in agriculture through their potato farm, which raises the seed and creates a clean stock for commercial potato growers around the nation.

Roger worked in the potato lab while in college, where one of the technicians took Roger under his wing. Roger said it was during this time that his interest in potato farming was piqued. Raised on a farm that grew potatoes, Roger said he never thought much of spuds before his time in the lab. Roger recalled propagating up to 1,000 plants on shelves in his dorm room.

From start to finish, the potato-generation process takes four years. All the while, you are hoping that crop succeeds. There are many issues with spuds that get in your way, like early frosts. Just ask the Starkels.

After college, when he and Kathy returned to the Mission Valley, they partnered with Roger’s brother, Ed, and Ed’s wife, Lynn, for the first 14 years of their careers as agriculture producers, splitting the harvest and the work.

They were farming 80 acres their first year, when a frost came in mid-September and temperatures dropped into the teens. They could only salvage 10 of the 80 acres they had planted.  Roger and Kathy had to take out a disaster loan that would end up taking them 10 years to pay off.

“It’s kind of frightening to be honest with you,” Kathy said.

Now, business is better than good. It’s booming. In the span of three months, Roger and Kathy will take one plant and make up to 100,000 plants from it — and they do this with 10 varieties of potatoes and five varieties of mint. The methods the Starkels created three decades ago have now become standards in the industry. The Starkels’ on-farm lab was the first of its kind in the nation, and possibly the entire world, Kathy said. Throughout the years, Roger has given dozens of tours to international farmers.

“I don’t tell them all the tricks but the gist of what we do,” Roger said, smiling.

It started out in a spare bedroom of the couple’s home, but once they started having children, the lab moved to a building about 100 feet from their front door. Using tissue culture and heat growth chambers, and closely guarded secret techniques, the Starkels have been able to very nearly rid their potato varieties of viruses.

The Starkels were the first in the nation to get mint plants to grow from a tissue culture. Through the same methods they have used with propagating their potatoes, they have been able to come in as a clean-up crew in the mint industry.

Each seed is propagated in sterile conditions under a hood that blows filtered air out over the samples to blow away any airborne bacteria. After the beginning stages, the young plants are planted in sterile soil in the summer. Those tubers are harvested as what Roger and Kathy call the “nuclear seed.” Then those seeds are hand cut and planted in groups of eight, with a two-foot space in between each group. Roger said the seed-potato growers in Montana spend ample amounts of money to keep their strains clean. One mistake can ruin upwards of 30,000 plants.

“If you’re not real careful, you can lose everything,” she said. “It only takes one year to ruin a reputation.”