Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes

[yorwba]

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544

[dang]

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544 - Jan 2026 (141 comments)

[Flavius]

This is a massive missed opportunity for financialization. We need a 3x Leveraged Bull Potato ETF immediately. Tokenize the crop, lock it in a vault and trade futures against the harvest. Why feed people for free when we could create artificial scarcity and pump the price 10x by next week?

McDonald’s fries pricing suggests the market has already priced in a massive supply squeeze. They are generating better margins on a sliced potato than the Central Banks get when they print fiat.

[puzzlingcaptcha]

Crop futures are already a thing. Potatoes are traded on EEX for example: https://www.eex.com/en/markets/agriculturals/potatoes

[seydor]

Duh. Just set up a viral potato coin and then short it to death

[yongjik]

I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism on everything, but dealing with excess produce is legitimately a hard problem because they have a shelf life and someone has to harvest them and move them to where consumers are.

[KellyCriterion]

but... will this solution be Cloud Native?

:-D

[assaddayinh]

Leave it to [capitalism|socialism] to organize artificial scarcity..

why does endstage one starts to feel like the other..

[novaRom]

Fun facts from Germany:

- Fresh Aldi potatoes are like 0.5 Euro per 1 Kilogram - basically the same price as 25 years ago when Euro currency was introduced

- Our national TV channel now shows a great collection of "potato recipes" videos on demand on its main page

- Price of McDonalds/BurgerKing fries is around 4 Euro, and 5-6 Euro as a street food

- Crisps like Pringles are like 15 Euro per 1 Kilogram (a typical 2.50 Euro for 175gm pack)

[KellyCriterion]

Small fries at McD had been lately around 2,99 EUR, that was very expensive given that the "small fries" are actually really small :-D

[solatic]

> “There were pictures of huge mountains of ‘earth apples’,” she recalled, using the word Erdäpfel, an affectionate term for the potato sometimes used by Berliners

Fun fact: the Hebrew translation of potato, תפוח אדמה, is the portmanteau of "earth" (אדמה) and "apple" (תפוח).

If you should ever be so fortunate as to have too many potatoes, see if you can shred them with a food processor and combine with onion, egg, salt, and pepper to make potato kugel, which freezes exceptionally well.

[docdeek]

The French term for potatoes is also ‘earth apple’: pomme de terre

[DonaldFisk]

Dutch is aardappel. Fun fact: there's a programming language called Aardappel: https://strlen.com/aardappel-language/

[notepad0x90]

Potatoes originated from the Americas, so I suppose that word was created in the past 500 years. But even for modern computer names, I would thing old languages would just use amalgamations like that.

[pixl97]

>make potato kugel,

This seems very similar to a hash brown breakfast casserole in the US.

[seydor]

the same in many languages, french pomme de terre, greek geomilo,

[didgetmaster]

Crops are a commodity where you can't instantly ramp up or down the supply to meet demand. Most require the better part of a year from seed to harvest. If it grows on trees, it can take years before they produce.

Forecasting crop output can also be tricky. Weather conditions, pests, or other things can lead to failed crops or bumper crops.

The life of a farmer can literally and figuratively be 'feast or famine'.

[pixl97]

This is why nations tend to have things like large stores of long lasting foods, and do things like crop insurance, so that they actually have farmers after a bad year to feed their people.

It is a very risky profession and unless you want to depend on other nations for your continued survival is absolutely needed.

[president_zippy]

My grandfather was a farmer in the 70s-80s, and he used futures on about 50% of his crop every year. Just enough to make sure a bad year can't wipe out the farm.

[dauertewigkeit]

All I want to know is if they are the floury kind or the waxy kind, or some in between hybrid. Floury potatoes are so hard to find these days. Almost everyone is growing these "allrounder" hybrids that cannot really be fried or roasted. I imagine these are also some kind of in between hybrid.

[BadBadJellyBean]

In my super market we usually have three kinds of potatos: festkochend (probably what you mean with waxy), vorwiegend festkochend (somewhere in between), weichkochend (maybe what you mean with floury, they fall appart easily)

[_frkl]

They were Agria, mehligkochend (not waxy): https://4000-tonnen.de/faq.html

[trebligdivad]

'Maris piper' are very common in the UK that I'd say are floury.

[chao-]

So this is a legit version of the Polish farmer who was robbed of 150 tons of potatoes after a fake social media post saying they were free?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/viral-free-potatoes-post-cos...

Good to see that not everything is awful all of the time.

[scirob]

It's good they didn't flood the market and tank the price.

It's real btw. I got a whole wagens worth and distributed amongst my neighbors

[nkmnz]

Finally a match for "der dümmste Bauer hat die dicksten Kartoffeln". Giving stuff away for free is literally "flooding the market".

[Ekaros]

I am not sure if flooding the market is something really doable. At least in short timeframe. Demand is mostly inelastic. And buyers have their own predictions. They won't buy more than they can pass on how matter cheap it is. So price will likely drop, but demand will not go up much.

[fph]

Giving them away for free also affects the market. Suddenly there are 100,000 fewer Berliners who go buy potatoes in a shop; that alters demand.

[Flavius]

> It's good they didn't flood the market and tank the price.

God forbid the price of food ever goes down. That would kill millions.

[arjie]

Food abundance is crazy to have. Preservation techniques are incredible right now as well. They're no match for a fresh fruit, but if I can get thawed grapes through the year without seasons having significance I'll take them. I am constantly impressed by these seemingly mundane improvements to our lives over the years that have advanced science and development behind them.

[fy20]

I watched a documentary a while ago on YT, I can't remember the name now, but it was talking about the negative affects of this.

It was discussing how crops are bred specifically for life span and storefront appeal, at the expense of other attributes like taste and nutrition. It focussed on tomatoes, but I'd assume it is true for all crops.

Also fun fact: a kg of tomato seeds can be worth more than a kg of gold.

[top_sigrid]

https://archive.ph/ClLpZ

[seb1204]

I heard the potato harvest was generally good in Germany. This particular company is rumored to transition to organic farming in the next season.

I think it is great to ensure the product gets used but I also heard that it puts many other potato farmers under price pressure in the area.

[novaRom]

Interestingly, some other products are also cheaper today than few months ago:

Basmati rice: -25% (2.5 Euro/Kg)

Pork: -25% (7-8 Euro/Kg)

Butter: -33% (4 Euro/Kg)

Coffee beans: -25% (10-12 Euro/Kg)

Chocolate: -15% (20-30 Euro/Kg)

[ChrisArchitect]

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544

And also:

https://www.4000-tonnen.de/

[rouanza]

Chop into fries, wash, quick boil 3 minutes, rinse with cold water, dry ( salad spinner works well). Fry in beef tallow and never use veg oil. Remove when crispy and place in drip basket. Season

[trhway]

Surprisingly (for people who never lived in USSR/Russia :) Belarus and Russia have very tight supply of potatoes (after outright shortages in 2025) with Russia importing Chinese potatoes.

[anticodon]

In 2023 there was record harvest of potatoes in Russia. Prices dropped, so farmers stopped planting potatoes in 2024 and 2025. Wouldn't be surprised if they plant more this year due to high price.

[Animats]

The US has a soy glut and a corn glut, and Germany has a potato glut. What to do with all those carbs? Feed cattle?

[pixl97]

Cattle, ethanol, vodka. Not sure what else with these numbers.

[throwaway173738]

Soy is a pretty good protein.

[burnt-resistor]

Meanwhile, Russia is importing potatoes because of record low harvests.

[dr_dshiv]

Weird abundance problems. Should we get used to it?

[burnt-resistor]

The fail-safe answer is: absolutely not. Climate change is already leading to mass migrations and decreasing food security due to greater variance in floods and droughts, and heat waves and cold snaps. We should be doing all we can to holistically improve food security by:

- expand fresh water reservoir, flood control, reclamation, and RO water generation capacity

- increase diversity of crop cultivars because monoculture is a liability, e.g., Gros Michel banana

- increase geographic distribution of farming

- improve long-term food preservation technology

- increase strategic food storage capacity rather than relying entirely upon for-profit, just-in-time-delivery and inventory minimization cost-optimization

- cut net GHG emissions and gradually return to pre-industrial levels

[onraglanroad]

Berlin: Take My Spuds Away

[president_zippy]

I foresee a busy year for potato flour and MRE processing plants.

... And those little boxes of instant au gratin.

[labrador]

Gemini 3.0 informs me that the surplus is so large it has overwhelmed the German biofuel industry capacity.

[novaRom]

I heard crops now cost more to transport than they are worth. Also, it drives most other prices down e.g. pork is getting cheaper.

[fifilura]

This kind of stunt is never received well in a working market economy.

Best case it will bankrupt well-meaning potato farmers.

Worst case, someone does it with malicious intent to grow a monopoly.