You clearly have not experienced an actual winter, just some weak-sauce facsimile, the sort you might get in northern Virginia. If I wanted to get potatoes rig

You clearly have not experienced an actual winter, just some weak-sauce facsimile, the sort you might get in northern Virginia. If I wanted to get potatoes right now from the back yard dirt I'd have to remove about two feet of hard-packed ice and snow, then chisel into dirt that may as well be concrete. At least solid ice and concrete respect a pick. Wet, frozen dirt just shrugs it off. Let me remind you that this year in places like Minnesota it was -60°F outside. Good luck getting anything out of the ground in those conditions. Even a backhoe is going to have trouble. I'd suggest using dynamite, but at those temperatures even dynamite won't work without being heated up first.