The current drought is not only impacting the length of time you can spend in the shower or how many loads of laundry you can do at home, it’s also determined that if you want to eat potatoes, they’ll have to be the small ones.There are plenty of local potatoes right now, so the imported ones are currently on embargo. The down side for many however, is that the local ones are not that big. Farmer Richie Bascome, from Westover Farms, in Somerset, said he’s disappointed with his crop but that it cannot be helped.“We’re short of 14 inches of rain,” said Peter Exell, of Tudor Farms, in Southampton. “That means there’s 14 feet less water in all Bermuda tanks. It has affected me. My yields are down 50 percent this year,” he added.Potatoes are an important crop for local commercial farmers. In many instances it forms the financial basis that keeps them afloat through the year. And the problem with the low yield of potatoes this year, is that it comes on the heels of a bad crop last year.“Farmers lost lots of stuff last year,” said Mr Exell. “So this year I planted later than February to avoid the wind. But it looks like all we farmers can do is decide how we want to be hurt wind or drought.”Mr Bascome hedged his chances of getting a good crop this year by sowing three crops at three different times. “But they all failed to produce large potatoes,” he said.“I planted before Christmas and high winds killed those. I planted again right after Christmas but there wasn’t enough rain and also aphids (an insect) were thick and sucked the life out of them.”Mr Bascome’s last crop survived and he’s harvesting them now but due to the lack of rain the potatoes are small.“Everybody wants big potatoes,” he lamented. “I think they just don’t understand how the small ones can be used that they are especially good for things like hash browns that you have for breakfast.”Mr Exell said in the two and a half fields he had harvested, he was finding a mix of medium sized potatoes and the small ones which many farmers call creamers.“We don’t bag the creamers with the bigger ones,” he said. But he does bag his creamers and sells them.“There is a market for them although definitely not as much as for the big ones,” he said. “The restaurants like them and eventually they all go,” he added.But Mr Bascome who is also a dairy farmer, said he doesn’t sell much of his creamers. “I feed those small potatoes to the cattle,” he said.The financial impact of the smaller potatoes will differ from farm to farm, but Frank Machado, of Franks Produce, in Paget, said he expects to be between 20,000 and 27,000lbs short of his normal yield. But he’s not complaining. He said he’s actually seeing a good amount of medium sized potatoes from the fields he’s harvested so far.“The early ones I planted have been doing pretty good,” he said. “The ones I planted at the end of December and the end of January are not going to do as well.”And it wasn’t completely by chance. Mr Machado said he purposely took his chances with the wind rather than hoping for rain.