Most of the larger ones needed cutting, divided into sections, each piece carrying at least one strong eye and roughly the amount of flesh needed to feed the new sprout until it could establish its own root system.
Cut too small and the piece wouldn't carry enough reserve. Cut through a bad section into a healthy one, and the rot could travel.
She learned the difference in the first hour and adjusted her knife angle without thinking much about it, the same way she'd learned a hundred other small calibrations on this farm by doing them wrong once and not doing them wrong again.
She set up a cutting station on a folding table in the barn: a board, a sharp knife she honed at the start of each session, a bucket for the finished pieces, and a bucket for waste that went straight to the compost bays.
She worked in sessions across the two weeks, a few hours at a time.
Birch Tadwell, the 16-year-old from the farm down the road, appeared at the barn door one afternoon looking for work.
She put him on the compost, turning and layering the 43 sacks of true rot with straw, chicken manure, and stockpiled dry leaves while she kept to the cutting herself.
By the time she finished, she had cut 11,000 and change seed pieces.
She wrote the number down and then looked at it for a moment before moving on to the next task.
11,000 seed pieces from 286 sacks.
This is not a garden.
This is a planting.
The cut pieces needed curing before they could go into the ground.
A freshly cut potato is an open wound, vulnerable to rot the moment it contacts wet soil.
Given several days in a cool, dry, ventilated space, the cut surface calluses over, sealing the exposed flesh.
She spread the pieces across every flat surface in the barn: old feed sacks stretched over hay bales, screens on sawhorses, even the clean section of the loft floor.
She dusted the cut sides with wood ash from the farmhouse stove, which accelerated the callusing and discouraged soft rot from taking hold at the edges.
Doss drove past the barn on the third day of this process.
He slowed.
He looked through the open barn doors at every flat surface covered in curing potato pieces spread out under the rafters.
He didn't stop.
He called through his open window as he rolled past.
"You feeding the whole state, or just trying to embarrass the rest of us?"
Ren didn't look up from the cutting board.
While the seed pieces cured, she worked the 71 feed-grade sacks into the hog and chicken operation.
She cooked batches down in a cast-iron pot over an outdoor fire, the soft potatoes breaking apart in the heat into a dense, starchy mash she mixed into the regular grain ration at a ratio she adjusted over the first week as she watched the animals' response.
The hogs came around to it immediately.
The chickens took four or five days to commit, then ate it steadily.
The difference to the feed bill was immediate and measurable.
Grain prices had climbed 10% since February and were still moving.
Working the mashed-potato ration into the daily feeding schedule cut her grain usage by roughly a third.
She wrote the number down.
"Feed savings already visible. This alone may have been worth the $400 before the field produces anything."
She thought about that.
She thought about Ray Burton's quiet remark on the dock.
County could use it working.
She thought about the two men at the fertilizer shelf.
Miller Creek boys already lost half their spring planting to standing water.