SALEM — Potatoes have prevailed against all challengers to obtain the coveted title of Oregon’s official state vegetable.

The House voted 41-10 in favor of the designation June 21 about three months after the Senate unanimously approved the resolution.

While the debate was mostly light-hearted, Rep. Jami Cate, R-Lebanon, warned lawmakers not to congratulate themselves too exuberantly for passing the proposal.

“It doesn’t really benefit our potato farmers. If we are really serious about wanting to promote agriculture, we should stop passing bills that restrict and put barriers on agriculture,” said Cate, a grass seed grower who voted against the resolution.

Other objections to the proposal centered on whether potatoes deserve to be singled out over other worthy contenders, such as onions or carrots.

Rep. Mark Owens, R-Crane, urged lawmakers to send the resolution back to the House Rules Committee for reconsideration.

He mentioned the possibility of combining potatoes and onions into a single state vegetable known as a “potonion,” but the motion was voted down.

“Why celebrate one vegetable when we can celebrate all the vegetables and all the farmers across the great state of Oregon?” Owens asked.

An amendment to the resolution would have qualified the state vegetable as a “loaded potato,” per the recommendation of Sen. David Brock Smith, R-Port Orford.

The proposed amendment was meant to honor dairy products commonly used on baked potatoes, including butter, cheese and sour cream, as well as bacon and chives produced in the state. However, lawmakers opted against changing the bill.

Greg Bennett, an onion farmer near Salem, worried that potatoes are most widely associated with neighboring Idaho and aren’t as distinctively Oregonian as onions.

Oregon produces about 21% of the nation’s onion supply but only 7% of its potato crop, Bennett said in submitted testimony. “That hardly warrants recognition as the state vegetable.”

The proposal’s chief sponsor, Sen. Bill Hansell, R-Athena, acknowledged that Oregon produces many vegetables of high quality but said none checked as many boxes as the potato.

For example, potatoes outproduce all other vegetable crops in the state, with about 2.6 billion pounds harvested from 44,000 acres a year, Hansell said during a legislative hearing on the proposal.

While onions also have been floated as a possibility for state vegetable, they’re grown on half as many acres and generate about 1 billion fewer pounds annually, he said.

Oregon is a top producer of carrot seed, which is planted to produce great volumes of the crop around the world, but it doesn’t quite fit the vegetable category, Hansell said.

“You don’t eat carrot seed, but you do eat potatoes,” he said.

In an interview Friday, June 23, Hansell called the potato a “legitimate and worthy vegetable.”

“I know the importance of the potato,” he said. “It’s the No. 1 vegetable crop in our part of the state.”

Hansell said Oregon produces more potatoes than all but three states. Only Idaho, Washington and Wisconsin produce more.

“It’s the No. 1 vegetable in Oregon by a considerable margin,” Hansell said.

Hansell disagreed that the new designation won’t help potato growers.

“Our potato growers will be able to use this in their marketing,” he said.

He also noted the generosity of potato growers around the state in the effort to fight hunger in Oregon.

“That had to have an impact on my colleagues,” Hansell said.

Supporters of the resolution also pointed out that all four corners of the state grow a variety of potato cultivars, which are processed into numerous uses.

“This resolution is not only diverse,” said Rep. E. Werner Reschke, R-Klamath Falls. “It’s equitable and inclusive of all potatoes.”