What would you do with these potatoes?

If you look at the leaves, can you tell what's doing the damage? They don't seem to hang around when I'm taking a close look, so there has to be many more of them than I'm seeing.

Whiteflies take off when I brush against the plant. Are they more of an esthetic problem, or can they do real damage? Get sticky strips or don't worry about it?

I've seen a couple of flea beetles, so I suspect they might be the primary problem. I've sprayed with neem oil only a couple of times. But if they've crawled off somewhere when I'm spraying, what good will that do? Should I get another type of pesticide? Or step up my neem regimen?

I saw one spotted cucumber beetle, but this isn't my house so I'm not there often enough to check more often. And definitely not there often enough to pick them off by hand. Is neem strong enough to deal with them?

I've seen tiny green leafhoppers, too. Are they more ferocious than they look? Real pest or just a nuisance?

There are three bags with potato plants of various sizes. I really want these potatoes to produce.

There are spiders and probably other good bugs crawling about, so I would like to think that the good bugs would just win out.

On the other hand, I'm kinda ready to douse these with something potent and be done with the bugs. What would you guys advise?

bump.

help! I'm really considering dumping some sort of pesticide on the plants and soil/straw. not sure what else to do.

Maybe if you just consistently spray with the neem for a week or so it will solve the problem. It looks like flea beetle damage to me, but I'm so expert either.

Although there are many holes in the leaves, they don't really appear to be doing much damage. The leaves appear to be still able to nourish the plant and that's what's important. I wouldn't do anything about them, at least for now.

Bigger problem seems to me might be that there is too much foliage above ground. As I understand in growing potatoes, as the stems get up about six inches you cover them up with just a couple of inches left sticking out, and as the plant continues to grow you keep doing that.
Potatoes are usually planted in a trench, then as they grow, the trench is filled up, sometimes even to being hilled up above ground level. The potatoes grow all the way along the buried stem. Digging them up is a lot of hard work, as you can imagine, unless you're a commercial farmer using equipment. That's one of the reasons for growing them in bag if you're only growing a few -- no digging.

Karen

Ok, sounds good. I'll continue with the neem. My concern was more for the two other bags with younger plants that might not be strong enough yet, but I'd rather give them the chance to fight it off than dump pesticide on them. Thanks for talking me down.

Glendale, sorry that I didn't mention that I intend to add more straw and probably some dirt. But I wanted to get some DG advice before I buried whatever critters are already in there. I'm an avid reader of the potato threads (which convinced me that I HAD to grow potatoes as soon as possible!) and I made the bags really tall. So I'm ready to keep filling it in as the potatoes grow upward.