Ontario’s potato harvest is on the home stretch despite drought and hot summer temperatures stretching into October.
Why it matters: Harvesting potatoes with a tuber pulp temperature above 18 °C increases the risk of soft rot and pythium leak diseases during storage.
Kevin Brubacher, Ontario Potato Board general manager, said many growers were starting to harvest between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. and were off the fields by 10 a.m. before the heat ramped up.
“We’re definitely watching the heat. You don’t want to go too far into the day when it was hot there,” agreed Quinton Woods, Gwillimdale Farm’s sales and plant operations manager. “But you’re able to get the acres that you need to get through in a day anyway.”
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He said Gwillimdale has harvested approximately 70 per cent of the crop at their Bradford and New Liskeard locations.
“Quality is good, yield is average, but I know that’s not indicative of everybody in the province,” said Woods.
Brubacher estimated yields are down 15 per cent, in part due to potato size, but “on the flip side of a dry year, quality is usually very good.”
A little over half of Ontario’s 38,000 to 40,000 potato acres are chipping varieties, which require a tuber pulp temperature below 18 °C before going into storage to limit disease or degradation of the crop.
Brubacher suggested that growers of earlier varieties may have encountered increased costs in cooling the crop for storage.
“A lot of the harvesting for the storage crop is happening now, and will be happening for the next few weeks,” Brubacher explained. “For the bulk of it, we’ve missed the extreme heat in the fall.”
