Potatoes.News Launches a Farsi Telegram Channel for Iran’s Potato Sector

Our most engaged readers are not in Europe or North America. They are in Iran.

That finding, drawn from sixteen months of search data, has led to a decision: from today, Potatoes.News publishes in Farsi.

سیب‌زمینی نیوز — our Farsi-language channel — is live on Telegram at t.me/fapotatoesnews.

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What the data showed

We publish in English and translate into more than twenty languages. Across the last sixteen months our reporting reached 240 countries and generated over six million search impressions.

Iran leads on the measure that matters most. Iranian readers click through to our articles at roughly seven times our site-wide average — the strongest engagement of any market we serve.

The wider region reinforces the picture. The Middle East and North Africa together account for close to a fifth of all clicks to the site, with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Yemen alongside Iran.

We had been treating that traffic as an interesting anomaly. It is not an anomaly. It is an audience.

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Why Iran matters to the potato industry

Iran produces several million tonnes of potatoes annually, placing it among the significant producers of the Middle East. Production is concentrated in Hamadan, Ardabil and Isfahan provinces, with cultivation spanning irrigated lowlands and high-altitude summer regions.

The agronomic conditions are demanding in ways that would be unfamiliar to a grower in the Netherlands or Idaho. Water availability constrains planning across much of the country. Summer heat pushes storage management to its limits. Disease and pest pressure follows a different calendar and a different profile.

What Iranian growers and agronomists have not had is industry journalism in their own language. Technical material circulates in English or not at all, and the gap between international research and the people who could apply it is a language gap as much as anything else.

That is the gap this channel is intended to close.

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What the channel publishes

The same reporting that appears on Potatoes.News, in Farsi:

Izifo nezinambuzane — identification, symptoms and control strategies for the pathogens that matter in the region.

Varieties and seed — new releases, seed certification developments, and how varieties perform under conditions comparable to Iran’s.

Crop nutrition — fertiliser programmes, deficiency diagnosis and the quality consequences of getting nutrition wrong.

Machinery and technology — equipment reviews and field reports from the International Potato Tour.

Markets — global price movements, trade flows and the developments shaping what growers are paid.

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Part of a wider plan

The Farsi channel is the first of a series of language-specific channels, each on the platform that its audience actually uses. Telegram for Farsi. Others will follow the same logic rather than a single template.

Hindi is next, ahead of the Global Potato Summit in India this December, where our team will be reporting from the ground.

For readers who prefer the web, the Farsi version of the site remains available at fa.potatoes.news.

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Sijoyine

If you grow, process, trade or study potatoes and read Farsi — or if you work with growers in Iran, Afghanistan or Tajikistan — the channel is open.

???? t.me/fapotatoesnews

And if you are reading this in a language we do not yet publish in properly, tell us. The Iranian audience found us before we found them. We would rather not repeat the delay.

Xhumana nathi