A warm spell delayed this year’s potato harvest in Guildhall, on Vermont’s northeastern border, by a week and a half. It wasn’t until October 10 that Matt Linehan’s 60 acres of potatoes got the hard frost needed to firm up their skins and kill the plants’ foliage, so the juicy vines won’t jam the harvester.
The farmer took the minor weather glitch in stride, even though he and his small crew had to race to bring in 1.5 to 1.8 million pounds of potatoes by Halloween or risk the tubers freezing underground. It’s been a good year overall, Linehan said on the morning of October 23 as he repaired a canvas potato bag with fishing line. In the barn nearby, his team sorted truckloads of Allison white potatoes, dug the previous evening.
Linehan’s Sparrow Arc Farm is the largest Vermont farm focused solely on spuds, which he sells throughout New England under his Northeast Kingdom Potato brand. His customers range from high-end Boston restaurants to the University of Vermont and Vermont Foodbank. The farm’s 30 varieties include five kinds of fingerlings, butter-yellow European golds, floury russets and a cultivar called blackberry, which he sliced open to reveal beet-purple flesh.
Linehan, 43, started growing potatoes 20 years ago as one of many market-garden vegetables before deciding they were his one true farming love. He uses the f-bomb liberally to emphasize things good and bad. The word LIBERTY is tattooed on his forearm, a souvenir from his youth in the Boston punk scene. Linehan jokes that this might give people the wrong idea about his politics: “This county voted for Trump three times,” he said, “but I like living with some diversity of opinion.”
On a late-October day, in the middle of the harvest, his brass eagle belt buckle was as dirt encrusted as his freshly unearthed tubers. This season contrasted sharply with recent back-to-back summers of extreme flooding. In the floods of 2023, Linehan lost 20 percent of his crop; in 2024, he lost more than 30 percent, and the floodwaters left 10-foot mud lines on the trees in some of his fields. All told, the Connecticut River washed away some $250,000 of his income over two years.
$42,000 in state emergency funds and a $12,000 crowdfunding campaign, which Linehan reluctantly launched, helped him recover some of his bottom line. But he still had to borrow a significant amount — at 7.5 percent interest — to cover the losses. With a grimace, Linehan said he avoids looking at the automatic withdrawals of his monthly payments: “I don’t want to fucking know.”
But after 25 years of growing vegetables, Linehan has no intention of giving up — or moving from the century-old Northeast Kingdom potato farm he bought for $315,000 in 2019. He lives in the original late-1700s farmhouse with the younger three of his four children, when they’re not with his ex.
Linehan farmed in Massachusetts, Maine and New York before moving to the Essex County hamlet, where New Hampshire’s Percy Peaks rise to the east. Now, he might see more moose than people on any given day. “It’s the nicest place I’ve ever lived and farmed,” he said. “I’m pretty well committed.”
Since those two devastating floods, Linehan has leased new parcels of land outside the floodplain. “We could lose a potato crop for a million other reasons,” he said. “Summer flooding is not one of them.”
Linehan bought the third-generation farm from the Peaslee family, who ran it until 2018. The massive barn still bears the name Peaslee’s Vermont Potatoes in blocky white letters on its dark red exterior. Fred and Gertrude Peaslee purpose-built the barn to store potatoes, and not much has changed over almost a century. “It was state of the art in 1928” and still does the job, Linehan said, though he’d prefer state of the art for 2026.
In the barn, two full-time employees and a neighbor sorted potatoes onto the conveyor belt of a bin piler. Six hands and one machine removed clumps of soil before the tubers headed through a chute of canvas bags onto a massive mound in one of the barn’s 21 concrete-lined storage bins. They’ll remain there, safely stored with a protective light coating of soil, until being washed before shipping.
Happily for potato farmers, animals other than ruminants can’t easily digest raw spuds. “Mice don’t like potatoes,” Linehan said.
The Natick, Mass., native was not always a potato specialist, but he fell for farming early, working in agriculture as a teen. “I really liked the pace of farming and the variety of it,” Linehan recalled. With no interest in college or the army, he landed an apprenticeship at the Farm School, a nonprofit in Athol, Mass. He started his first organic market garden operation in 2006 in Troy, Maine. In 2014, he moved his Sparrow Arc Farm to New York’s Hudson Valley, where he expanded to 70 acres of produce, plus 40 of potatoes.
Linehan gradually learned that the more potatoes he grew, the more money he made. “They’re only worth something when you have a whole fucking bunch of them,” he said. “I realized that the potatoes were kind of paying for everything, and I enjoyed doing them more.” After years of being a generalist, “I wanted to get good at something.”
The farmer and his potatoes benefited. Once Linehan focused on their needs, analyzing their leaves each week to determine how much pest control or fertilizer to apply, he doubled his yield per acre to 40,000 pounds. Managing people had never been his favorite task, he said, and potatoes lend themselves more to mechanization than mixed vegetables do, so he could employ fewer people and pay them better.
Linehan has become a go-to expert on potato cultivation in Vermont. He represents the state on the board of Potatoes USA, the national potato marketing organization, at several meetings a year. A proud champion of the potato, he likes to remind people that the humble root vegetable delivers as much potassium as a banana.
October is all-hands-on-deck time at the farm, and, on the 23rd, Linehan needed to keep the harvest moving to stay ahead of the falling temperatures. As he navigated a tractor pulling a windrower harvester, Fenway red potatoes tumbled like giant marbles up and off the back of the belt.
Weeds obliged the farmer to stop several times and extract them from the machine’s rotating discs, which meant dropping to the ground to reach into the harvester’s underbelly. Lying on his side at eye level with the soil, Linehan noted, “We have really good dirt here.”
After the third weed-prompted interruption, Linehan cursed them with his favorite expletive. “Proof I don’t use herbicides,” he noted ruefully.
I want regular people on budgets to be able to buy my potatoes.
Matt Linehan
Linehan’s Northeast Kingdom potatoes are not organic, although he farmed organically before moving to Vermont. He still follows many of those practices, such as applying kelp juice for extra nutrients: “The organic part of me doesn’t die — and that works!” Linehan has never used potent neonicotinoid insecticides, which will be phased out in Vermont by 2029. Both neonicotinoids and herbicides are the industry standard on conventional potato operations, he said.
Back in the tractor’s cab, Linehan said fertilizer is the main reason he’s not organic. The price of his Canadian fertilizer has skyrocketed as it is, he said, doubling since 2020 before climbing another 15 percent this year. Using organic fertilizer would drive his potato price too high.
“I want regular people on budgets to be able to buy my potatoes,” he said. The White Market in St. Johnsbury, he noted, goes through 2,000 pounds a week.
His price per pound varies by distribution channel — Linehan doesn’t set retail prices — but averages about 60 cents. His potatoes are sold at many independent grocers and co-ops around the state and through the Center for an Agricultural Economy’s Just Cut program, which sells peeled and precut produce to University of Vermont dining services, among others.
The farm’s largest account is Vermont Foodbank, which has contracted to buy close to 100,000 pounds of potatoes from this year’s harvest, according to Mike Thomas, the nonprofit’s director of food resources. Thomas said locally grown potatoes from Sparrow Arc and Chappelle’s Vermont Potatoes in Williamstown are a cornerstone of the Vermonters Feeding Vermonters program, supported by state funding.
Across all levels of culinary skill and personal taste, Thomas said, “Anyone can use a potato.”
Sean-Michael Lizotte, executive chef of the Charles Hotel and its flagship restaurant, Henrietta’s Table, in Cambridge, Mass., represents the fancier part of Linehan’s clientele. The chef has bought produce from Linehan for about 20 years. From the beginning, he said, “Matt took great pride in everything he grew.” Over the decades, Lizotte said, Linehan has been a straight-shooting, reliable supplier of top-quality product who “does everything the way it should be done.”
The Charles buys 400 to 800 pounds of Linehan’s potatoes weekly. Lizotte is charmed — no surprise — by the recent addition of Fenway reds, which he uses for mashed potatoes. Atlantics make great hash browns, beef tallow-fried French fries and potato chips, the chef said. For Henrietta’s classic scrod dish, the kitchen serves a mix of Soraya gold, Fenway red, the blackberry potato, and purple-skinned and golden-fleshed Peter Wilcox, all boiled and then crisped in clarified butter.
Beyond their deep bond over potatoes, Linehan credits the Charles with delivering a career highlight: Back when Sparrow Arc Farm still grew carrots, the Dalai Lama complimented the ones served at the hotel. “That was next-fucking-level,” Linehan said.
Perhaps on a future visit, His Holiness will try the farmer’s Northeast Kingdom-grown potatoes. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Spud Specialist | Northeast Kingdom Potato rebounded from major flood losses to keep growing for chefs, stores and food shelves”
This article appears in November 4 • 2026.
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