International Day of Potato 2025 set for May 30

May 02, 2025

FAO has announced the theme for the International Day of Potato 2025: Shaping history, feeding the future.

Cultivated in more than 100 countries, the potato has a rich past and a promising future. As the world’s leading non-grain food crop, it reached a record annual production of 383 million tonnes in 2023. Today, developing countries account for more than half of global output, with demand and consumption continuing to rise.

“From the soil to the plate, the potato holds the power to transform lives,” says Yurdi Yasmi, director of FAO Plant Production and Protection Division. “To ensure a sustainable food-secure future benefitting from potato, we must accelerate the adoption of climate-smart varieties and agronomic practices, scale up access to quality seeds and promote integrated pest management of the crop. In doing so, we can grow a future where every farmer thrives, every plate is nourishing, and every harvest feeds hope,” he explains.

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Video: Spring 2026 weather outlook for Wisconsin; What an early-arriving El Niño could mean

Northeast Wisconsin is a small corner of the world, but our weather is still affected by what happens across the globe.

That includes in the equatorial Pacific, where changes between El Niño and La Niña play a role in the weather here -- and boy, have there been some abrupt changes as of late.

El Niño and La Niña are the two phases of what is collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO for short. These are the swings back and forth from unusually warm to unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator.

Since this past September, we have been in a weak La Niña, which means water temperatures near the Eastern Pacific equator have been cooler than usual. That's where we're at right now.

Even last fall, the long-term outlook suggested a return to neutral conditions by spring and potentially El Niño conditions by summer.

But there are some signs this may be happening faster than usual, which could accelerate the onset of El Niño.

Over the last few weeks, unusually strong bursts of westerly winds farther west in the Pacific -- where sea surface temperatures are warmer than average -- have been observed. There is a chance that this could accelerate the warming of those eastern Pacific waters and potentially push us into El Niño sooner than usual.

If we do enter El Nino by spring -- which we'll define as the period of March, April and May -- there are some long-term correlations with our weather here in Northeast Wisconsin.

Looking at a map of anomalously warm weather, most of the upper Great Lakes doesn't show a strong correlation, but in general, the northern tiers of the United States do tend to lean to that direction.

The stronger correlation is with precipitation. El Niño conditions in spring have historically come with a higher risk of very dry weather over that time frame, so this will definitely be a transition we'll have to watch closely as we move out of winter.