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JANUARY 2019 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC


BC potatoes yields increase in 2018


Good weather, lessons learned in 2017 helped improve crop


by SEAN HITREC DELTA – BC potato farmers


saw above-average yields in 2018, while the rest of Canada and the US struggled to get their potatoes out of the ground. “We got five stars in British


Columbia this harvest,” says Bill Zylmans, seed potato grower and chair of the BC Potato and Vegetable Committee. “Everybody else, they had a terrible harvest.” Zylmans talked to Country


Life in BC in early December from the airport in Washington, DC after traveling there to meet with growers from across the US and Canada at an industry trade meeting. Many growers east of the Rockies were hit with wet weather during harvest. In Canada alone, it’s been reported that 16,000 acres of potatoes are frozen in the ground. Here in BC, however, things


are looking very good. Zylmans says based on what he’s seen, fields have averaged upwards of 18 tons per acre versus 15 last year. Two major factors helped


yields, says Zylmans. One was the weather and the other was the lessons learned the previous year. The harvest in


2017 wasn’t much to talk about; a wet spring saturated soil and prevented planting for several weeks. In 2018, the weather


allowed farmers to work their fields sooner. Delta’s Peter Guichon, who farms more than 1,200 acres – roughly a sixth of BC’s potato acreage – finished planting in May, weeks before the previous year. He ultimately harvested around two tons more per acre in 2018 than in 2017. “People don't think that [planting a few weeks earlier] means a lot, but those are days before the days start getting shorter,” he says. “In the last 30 years, this is only the second year we've ever been done planting in May. Usually it lingers on until the 10th or 15th of June.” That’s just a week before the summer solstice, after which daylight hours diminish. The extra growing time in


spring kickstarts larger yields in fall varieties and a quicker- to-market – and therefore more profitable – spring potato. The icing on the potato cake this year was being able to pull all the product out of the ground before the rain. “We did have that bad


week of weather there just at


17


Off to storage: BC potato producers are reporting a better-than-average harvest in 2018. SEAN HITREC PHOTO


the end of September, which put a little bit of a wrinkle into our harvest,” says Zylmans. “[However], once we got past Thanksgiving, October was gorgeous and everything got harvested.” Guichon says 2018 was


even better than 2016, when BC saw above-average yields of close to 16 tons an acre according to Statistics Canada. In contrast, 2017 yields were just over 14 tons an acre. In addition to the weather,


Zylmans credits better crop management than in 2017,


when farmers rushed to plant when the weather finally allowed it. for example, Zylmans broadcast fertilizer in 2017 instead of working it into the ground. When the summer offered little rain, the fertilizer wasn’t able to reach the lower areas in the soil and tuber weights suffered as a result. Irrigation was also used


more effectively than previous years. Guichon had a team of four working on irrigation all day, every day, in the heat of the summer. “July and August were


really hot, so we irrigated more than ever this year – everybody did,” he says. “The amount of irrigation was almost double from other years.” For Zylmans, learning


processes like this are what makes his job worth doing. “There's never two years the same. There's never two crops the same, and you pick up the high points and you pick up your negatives and you try to improve,” he says. “That's what agriculture's all about.”


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