CELEBRATING 133 YEARS AS CANADA’S PREMIER HORTICULTURAL PUBLICATION
AUGUST 2013
VOLUME 63 NUMBER 08
EXTREME WEATHER
@mothernature: a tweet of things to come KAREN DAVIDSON Farming or fishing? Sometimes it hasn’t been clear this summer as extreme rainstorms flood vegetable fields. “It’s been bloody crazy this year,” says Ian Nichols, president, Weather INovations Consulting, (WIN) based in Chatham, Ontario. “In the flat plains around Chatham-Kent, the heavy rains are creating big ponds and the soil is being starved of oxygen – not great growing conditions.” With more than 500 WIN rain gauges reporting across Ontario, most of the province was more than 100 per cent of normal in precipitation and in the southwestern corner, 200 per cent of normal had been recorded by mid-July. Corey Versnel, chair of the Essex County Associated Growers, is one of the rain’s victims, with some of his squash flooded out completely. Located just west of Leamington, the tomato capital, he was more optimistic about his tomato crop which was in full flower in mid-July. As farmers of high-value fruits invest in more high-tech equipment – hail netting, frost fans, high tunnels –to blunt the force of Mother Nature, vegetable growers are more vulnerable with their field crops. To some degree, social media has been helping. Tweets from agronomists such as
INSIDE Growing Forward 2: More Q than A Page 4 Grocery channels are fracturing FOCUS: Storage/Containers
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An exceedingly wet summer in Ontario is challenging growers from Windsor to Ottawa. Here, Corey Versnel, chair of the Essex County Associated Growers, wades into a sweet corn field in a mid-July heat wave to examine development. While many vegetable crops such as tomatoes and beans are contracted for nearby processing plants, a good percentage is also shipped fresh to local farmers’ markets and the Ontario Food Terminal. Photo by Glenn Lowson. Janice LeBoeuf (@ontariotomato) are warning of diseases on the wind. For example, the Ontario vegetable specialist tweeted on July 18: Late blight in neighbouring states, but no confirmed Ontario cases yet. How to protect your tomato crop. Her 875 followers are alerted to the threat as well as how to time prevention. In Manitoba, a similar system sponsored by Syngenta is operating with success for potato growers. Twice-weekly reports with input from 32 weather stations are tabulated by Andy Nadler, the western Canadian operations manager and agricultural meteorologist for WIN. He also gathers information from the provincial plant pathologist Vikram Bisht as well as Keystone Potato Producers’ Association. The complimentary report is emailed to about 250 growers. Here’s an example:
“
What we’re finding is that disease is
changing. The strains are different and tend to evolve.” Andy Nadler
Hot days of 30°C + (in the last couple of weeks) has led to heat stress sprouts on tubers in some fields. The temperatures have now cooled down and there has been plenty of rainfall throughout Manitoba. This has led to an increase in the DSVs (Late blight Disease Severity Values) in western and central parts of the province. A few weather station sites are at or over the threshold of 18. Fields close to these sites should now be considered for regular weekly fungicide application for late blight management. If your fields are in general vicinity of high DSVs, it will be good to protect even the late-planted fields. Many fields are now row closed, and must have received at least a couple of protectant fungicide sprays. “What we’re finding is that disease is changing,” says Nadler
who also posts the weekly provincial potato aphid reports (@mbpotatoes). “The strains are different and tend to evolve. The conditions that we encountered with late blight a decade ago are different today. That means management and forecasting need to keep up.” For any grower unconvinced of the value of Twitter, just go to the Twitter sites of these agronomists for photos identifying key pests and videos. It’s like being in the field with a personal plant pathologist and weather expert. Sheldon Wiebe agrees. He follows these reports to protect his 1200 acres of potatoes near Carberry, Manitoba. “It’s a fantastic tool,” says Wiebe. “I tighten up my fungicide treatment from seven days to five days if growing conditions are ideal for late blight.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 3