Southern Alberta potato producers will need nearly perfect weather for the remainder of the growing season.
Otherwise, it will be difficult to beat the frost and produce a high quality product, says Rob Van Roessel, who farms near Bow Island, Alta.
“When the first killing frost comes will be very critical to how much revenue this industry generates this year,” said Van Roessel, who has 300 acres of process potatoes in the ground.
The first frost typically arrives around Sept. 21 in southern Alberta, and Van Roessel said growers in the region are beginning to worry the crop won’t mature in time.
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“We’re going to need a very good summer,” he said.
Like most growers in the region, Van Roessel has watched his potato crop struggle in this spring’s cool conditions. Twenty of his 300 acres were drowned out.
It’s estimated that 4,000 acres of processing potatoes across southern Alberta were lost to excess rain, said Edzo Kok, executive director of the Potato Growers of Alberta.
“We estimate drown-outs to be about 15 percent of our process acres.”
He said it’s unlikely yields will increase by 15 percent to compensate for the lost acreage and satisfy process potato contracts.
“We try to plant fairly close to our historical yields so we don’t have a lot of overage,” Kok said.
“We would need extremely exceptional weather going forward to bring this crop to an above average crop.”
Crop quality is also a concern because growers receive bonuses for producing potatoes that are a desirable colour and are high in dry matter.
Processors prefer low moisture spuds because french fry processing removes water from the potato, so a high water content reduces the number of fries extracted from each potato.
Kok said producers are attempting to ensure the quality of the crop by adding fertilizer to their fields.
Much of the nitrogen and other nutrients leached out of the soil during the heavy rain this spring, he added. As a result, potato plants are smaller than they should be in the early part of July.
“It’s critical that we get some fertilizer on the crop because it is showing evidence of lacking. We don’t have the foliage colour we’d like to see at this time of year.”
Getting nutrients into the soggy soil has been a challenge, whether producers spread granular fertilizer or use high clearance sprayers.
“Other fellows are trying to put it (liquid nitrogen) through their pivots and are struggling to get their pivots to go full circle because of the wet spots on their field,” Kok said.
In Western Canada’s other primary growing region, Manitoba producers are coping with disease pressure because late blight has been detected on four commercial potato fields in the province.
The relative humidity was in the 60s and 70s during the first 10 days of July, and the disease risk is high across the province. Growers are spraying fields with fungicide every five days.
