The discovery of clubroot in eastern Alberta has prompted a young entrepreneur to invent a cleaning system for her truck-mounted soil sampler.
Sheena McKelvie attached sprayer nozzles to the wheel wells of her truck that spray a 12 percent bleach solution on the tires. She turns on the sprayers by activating a switch in the cab.
McKelvie said spraying the bleach solution each time she enters and leaves a field eliminates the spread of clubroot by any soil stuck to her truck tires. Clubroot is mainly spread through soil.
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“When you’re trying to do business in farmers’ fields, you want to show you’re doing the right thing,” said McKelvie, who started her own independent soil testing business, Sheena Soil Sampling, earlier this month.
“It’s important for an agronomist to take the lead.”
The discovery of clubroot in Vermilion County this fall prompted McKelvie and her farming partner, Mads Merrild, to invent a way for McKelvie to take soil samples with her truck-mounted soil sampler without the possibility of spreading the disease through fields.
“It would have stopped the business going forward.”
The bleach solution is contained in a tank on the truck.
McKelvie said soil sampling is an important tool for farmers but is difficult to do properly by hand, especially if the ground is hard. The truck-mounted soil probe allows correct soil samples to be taken without leaving the truck cab.
“It’s all controlled from inside the cab and the only time I have to get out of the truck is to dump the stainless steel bucket into the sample bag at the end of each field,” she said.
Clubroot has the potential to reduce canola yields in half. The confirmation of a field in Vermilion County contaminated with clubroot raised fears among farmers about the spread of the disease by contractors driving through fields.
Blasts of air clean the soil probing equipment after each soil sample, which she said eliminates the possibility of contamination through the soil sampling equipment.
Stephen Srelkov, a clubroot specialist from the University of Alberta , said bleach is an effective way to kill clubroot pathogen spores, particularly if the spores are present in a fine dust.
It be wouldn’t be as useful if spores are in big clumps of soil, he added.
Srelkov said mounting spray nozzles near the wheels sounded like an “interesting system.”
