Michael Pollan, in an interview from 2008 said:

“I visited an industrialized potato farm in Idaho and saw how freely pesticides were used. The farmers had little patches of potatoes by their houses that were organic. They couldn’t eat their field potatoes out of the ground because they had so many systemic pesticides. They had to be stored for six months to off-gas the toxins.”
– Michael Pollan Interview, The Progressive, November 2008