Potatoes and the Upper Snake River Plain

Idaho's most famous export grows best in volcanic soil watered by precise irrigation, and the Snake River Plain around Idaho Falls has produced it in enormous quantities for well over a hundred years. The Russet Burbank potato, developed by Luther Burbank in the eighteen seventies, found its ideal home in the cold nights and warm days of the high desert east of the Cascades. As canal systems expanded after nineteen hundred, more and more of the plain around Idaho Falls was converted to potato ground.

By the mid-twentieth century, Bonneville County and its neighbors were among the highest-yielding potato regions on earth. The industry made fortunes, built the downtown commercial blocks visible today, and drew waves of migrant labor from Mexico beginning in the nineteen forties, a community that has shaped Idaho Falls deeply ever since.