Is there a potato grower moving onto cropland next to your farm on the Canadian Prairies? It used to be that Canadians associated potato growing with Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. No longer: Alberta grows around 25 per cent of Canada’s potato crop, closely followed by Manitoba with 23 per cent and P.E.I. trailing with only 20 per cent of Canada’s potato tonnage.
In terms of acreage, it means Alberta is at 80,000, Manitoba at 79,000 and Saskatchewan at 7,000 acres. The crop occupies 166,000 acres of prime Prairie agricultural land, primarily irrigated land. Potatoes must be in a one-in-four or one-in-five crop rotation, meaning roughly 700,000 acres of Prairie potato cropland production are in a four- to five-year crop rotation cycle.
Irrigated cropland is very expensive, ranging up to $4 million a quarter section. Saskatchewan is slated to spend $4 billion on irrigated cropland in the next few years. Presently 60,000 to 65,000 acres of Alberta’s cropland are irrigated, 60,000 in Manitoba and likewise the 7,000 in Saskatchewan.
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Financially, potatoes are the fourth most important field crop in Manitoba, ahead of corn but behind soybeans. Some 90 per cent of Manitoba’s frozen potato products are exported to the U.S., as is the case in Alberta.
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In the Edmonton area, potato field after potato field have also gone into growing tiny grape-sized potatoes for the locally-based Little Potato Company, which has become a roaring success, selling bags of “little potatoes” from Miami to Anchorage. You will find these little potatoes everywhere in North America where vegetables are sold. Little potatoes are an amazing boost for the potato industry, putting fresh potatoes back on the dinner table.
You can recognize a “little potato” crop by the rows in the field. The little potato seed potato crop is planted in early to mid-May, in rows about a foot apart, with the potato tubers or tuber pieces planted at around nine inches (20 cm) in the row (furrow).
Southern, central and particularly northern Alberta also produce 60 per cent of Canada’s seed potatoes, with up to 20 per cent or more from British Columbia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Alberta potato seed ends up in at least 24 U.S. states, primarily Washington and Idaho, and nine Canadian provinces. Alberta seed is credited with “northern vigour,” a consequence of growing potatoes in a colder climate. Seed potatoes grown in a cold climate will boost commercial yields by up to 10 per cent or more in the warmer U.S., a fact confirmed by research done in Scotland.
Big into Burbank
In recent years, some 80 per cent of all potatoes grown in both Canada and the U.S. were Russet Burbank (a.k.a. Russets, Gems, Idaho Bakers). This was dictated by the french fry industry and in particular the fries sold by “hamburger” outlets. In order to maintain consistency in their product, it had to be Russet Burbank. This remarkable variety was bred by a Luther Burbank in 1873 in California. Around the world, wherever there were international burger chains, they had to be supplied with Burbank. Today thousands of other potato varieties flood the market in both Canada and the U.S. and Russet Burbanks still make up around 40 per cent of the commercial potato tonnage.
When I first came to Alberta in the 1970s, about 40,000 acres of potatoes were grown in the province, about half of today’s acreage. A large percentage was grown for seed exported to the U.S. and to the rest to Canada. In the irrigated fields of southern Alberta, much of the potato industry was dominated by Japanese families, descendants of the Canadian Japanese who were interned in the Lethbridge area during the Second World War. Later on, many Dutch farmers moved into virtually all of the Prairies’ potato-growing regions.
Potato yields in Alberta and Manitoba, in the 1970s, were often at eight to 10 tons an acre, a level considered good at the time. As a consequence of cleaning up potato diseases, via tissue culture and appropriately balanced fertilizer levels, the most recent yields in 2024 are 20 tons per acre for Alberta and 18 for Manitoba. When I visited Washington state growers in the early 1990s, I was able to inspect irrigated potato fields of Russet Burbank that yielded between 24 and 34 tons an acre. One grower in that state even hit 40 tons, using Alberta-grown Russet Burbank seed potatoes. The secret behind the Washington yield was good Canadian seed stock, disease control (primarily sclerotinia) and a fully balanced crop rotation that involved all four macronutrients (N, P, K, S) as well as adequate levels of all the known micronutrients such as boron, copper, zinc, molybdenum and manganese.
Take full note, that there were no plant breeders involved. This huge yield was accomplished with nutrients, careful irrigation, pesticides and the same old Russet Burbank potato first bred in 1873. This is not to say plant breeders don’t deserve lots of credit, but it does show what optimum crop management can achieve with “old” proven varieties.
Disease detection
Lots of scientists in Canada, particularly in Alberta and British Columbia, were involved in potato disease control. One of my first jobs with Alberta Agriculture in 1981 was to be in charge of the control program for bacterial ring rot of potatoes (BRR). This program meant all commercial potato fields were to be inspected for this very destructive disease annually, with the help of county fieldmen. This highly infectious bacterial disease could wipe out entire potato crops in storage. The federal government was responsible for BRR control, a quarantinable disease in potato seed grower fields.
In the 1980s, John Stenrue, my technical help and I decided to determine exactly how this most destructive disease of potatoes persisted in Canadian potato stocks. Thousands of researchers worldwide had attempted to understand how this very destructive disease spread around potato crops. It was thought that BRR persisted on discarded potatoes and on bagging, cleaning, storage and transport equipment.
John Stenrue doubted this, based on the 30 or more years he worked with potatoes, primarily Russet Burbank. With the help of the federal agriculture department in B.C., we set up BRR disease dilution trials on commonly grown potato varieties in Alberta. The BRR culture obtained from B.C. was BRRCS3 (R8), obtained from Dr. Solke de Boer, and was used in all of our infectivity trials. We ran water dilution trials of this bacterial strain on a number of commonly grown potato varieties. We used water dilutions of the CS3 strain from zero to up to a million. We found we could infect some potatoes in the growing season with dilutions of one in 10,000 and even one in 100,000. Russet Burbank was not infected in the same season if the dilution factor was greater than one in 1,000. In a final experiment in 1985, we took tubers of BRR-resistant potatoes Urgenta, Teton and BelRus that had been vacuum-infiltrated as tuber cut pieces the previous season with BRR spores. When these cut pieces were bound to cut pieces of the “healthy”-appearing tubers of the potato Pontiac, we got 70 per cent BRR disease transmission. In other words, the BRR bacterium could remain dormant in potato tubers for perhaps one or more years. In fact, Russet Burbank was a kind of BRR “Typhoid Mary.”
The resulting paper, as an abstract, was published in 1986 (Evans, I.R., and Stenrue, J.B., 1986. A field technique for demonstrating bacterial ring rot (BRR) in symptomless potato varieties. Can. J. Plant Pathol. 8: 348. (Abstr). Presented in July 1986 at the annual meeting of the Canadian Phytopathological Society).
This information “blew the roof off” the worldwide notions of how BRR was spread in potatoes. Subsequently, Dr. de Boer did some excellent work on refining the detection technology for this worldwide disease problem. Few if any accolades came our way, despite the enormous importance of pinpointing how this very destructive disease survived to severely damage potato production.
Anyone needing further reading on potato diseases will want to look up the potato chapter I put together in the text that can be accessed online, Diseases and Pests of Vegetable Crops in Canada. It has some 50 disease illustrations and 44 pages on specific destructive diseases that affect potatoes.
BRR is presently well under control in Canadian and U.S. potato stocks but even now the odd destructive outbreak may occur — a highly destructive potato disease that is now essentially under full control.
If you want to really take a look at the BRR problem check the Alberta Agriculture fact sheet “Understanding bacterial ring rot in potatoes” (Agdex 258/635-5). The information on the fact sheet of this very destructive disease has surfaced in many countries worldwide with little or no reference to its solution in Western Canada — a Canadian input that has saved countless millions of dollars worldwide for potato production.
Final thought: “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.” – Winston Churchill.
