Walter that information is very useful and also very informative. I grew up on LI and knew about the potato farms while everyeone was grumbling about losing the farms as they poured into the Grumman/Republic parking lots for work. I was a cheerleader iat Huntington HS--one of our cheers was.......... (groan) Long Island potatoes, California cactus We're playing Bay Shore Just for the practice" Now isn't that a bell-ringer? Not valuable or even interesting, but.... Soyamaven@aol.com wrote: On 1/28/04 (2:31:42 PM MST), as part of a posting to NY-LONGISLAND-L@rootsweb.com, Nancy Coleman (NLColeman@worldnet.att.net) wrote, "Twelfth for potatoes (I think we used to be second behind Idaho until a blight hit the Long Island crops about 35? years ago - Walter, when was that?). First, you forgot to mention that Suffolk County is the number 1 county in New York in agriculture receipts. Second, on potatoes: the blight -- developers and their sub-divisions -- began the destruction of what had been potato fields in the mid-1950s, as the new national highway system made it cheaper to ship potatoes from farther away areas into the NYC area putting downward pressure on locally grown potatoes and demand for suburban housing bid up the price of land away from potatoes. As a bulk commodity, potatoes had been too expensive to do that prior to the Interstate highway system. Additionally, people's taste changed, preferring the russet as grown in Idaho and Washington over the katahdin (named after Mount Katahdin in Maine) as grown along the East Coast. By the way: the potato and tomato have the same ending because they came from the same area: the Peruvian Andes, and the potato was worth more than all the gold that the conquistadors stole from South America. I hope this information is useful or, at least, interesting. Walter Greenspan ==== NY-LONGISLAND Mailing List ==== Karima, List Administrator mailto:NY-LONGISLAND-admin@rootsweb.com List Guidelines: http://userweb.springnet1.com/quest/LongIslandWelcome.html Jan G. Miller jgrellim@sbcglobal.net