Potato is the fourth largest grain crop of China and important crop for poverty alleviation and planting-cooperative is an important pattern of potato production. In order to study the development situation and ascertain the future development direction of potato cooperatives, this paper, based on field survey data, uses stochastic frontier analysis of production function to estimate technical efficiency of planting potato cooperatives in the western areas .The result shows that the western planting-potato-cooperatives have great potential for the improvement of technical efficiency, controllable elements such as service time, expert guidance ,difference degree in shares, natural talent, business scope of cooperatives and incentive method for management have significant impact on efficiency losses of cooperatives.Therefore, this paper proposes that it is quite significant that general investment cost and land size should be reduced to improve the investment allocation of resources and at the same time, six elements should be effectively controlled to enhance the sustainable development and efficiency for potato cooperatives.