Arlington, P.E.I. farmer battling potato beetles with modern twist on old invention

ARLINGTON, P.E.I. — As he stood amidst the ruins of his 2021 potato crop, Jason Matthews realized he wanted to get artistic if he hoped to salvage his subsequent 12 months’s harvest.

Final 12 months, the Colorado potato beetle, the hated enemy of gardeners and farmers the size and width of North America, wreaked havoc on Matthews’s mixed-market backyard and poultry farm, and put a disastrous dent within the yield of considered one of his hottest crops.

“The beetles type of took us for nearly all we had for potatoes,” he recalled.

Matthews operates J&L Farms in Arlington, in western P.E.I., along with his spouse Lisa Handrahan. They’ve offered their produce on the Summerside Farmers Marketplace for a number of years. The farm just isn’t licensed natural, however Matthews doesn’t use pesticides on his crops.

Historically, they’ve managed the potato beetle downside by monitoring their crops day by day, and laboriously handpicking the pests, reasonably than simply spraying for them. It takes a whole lot of further work, however the farm’s comparatively small scale makes it a doable, if barely taxing, train.

However after the catastrophe that was the 2021 crop, Matthews received artistic find an answer. He reimagined an outdated piece of expertise utilized by P.E.I. farmers previous to the wide-scale introduction of pesticides.

Again in these days, growers used machines with delicate paddles or brushes that had been pushed or pulled alongside plant rows. The paddles would slap the potato vines and sweep any hooked up bugs right into a receptacle for straightforward disposal.

A person named Allan Hunter of Dundas, P.E.I., patented a mechanical potato bug picker in the 1890s and offered quite a few the machines to fellow farmers.

Matthews remembered seeing such a tool in O’Leary’s Canadian Potato Museum, so he created his personal model and rigged it as much as be pulled behind his tractor. 

“It’s one thing we’ve been planning on constructing for the previous few years. In any case, it lastly got here collectively this 12 months out of final 12 months’s catastrophe,” he mentioned.

Matthews, like most farmers, is used to doing extra with much less and discovering artistic options to complicated issues. It’s not the primary time he has rigged collectively a DIY contraption to assist make issues somewhat simpler across the homestead.

“I feel it’s nice that he constructed that. It saves a whole lot of time strolling up and down the fields with the stick and might (accumulating bugs),” mentioned Handrahan.

Matthews’s machine consists virtually completely of components that had been already across the farm. The one items he had to purchase had been a few metal pipes to increase the machine’s axle so it could possibly be pushed between potato rows. Different items included the rear axle off an outdated garden tractor, the bottom off an outdated La-Z-Boy, a spindle from a lawnmower deck, two five-gallon buckets, the belt off an outdated square-bailer and a few odds and ends of scrap metallic.

“I’m fairly good at developing with methods of constructing my very own (gear). It would not at all times work out, there’s much more failure in my innovations than there may be success. However when there may be success … to date so good,” he mentioned.

Grownup potato beetles are conspicuous sufficient that anybody eschewing using pesticides can simply spot them and take away them from crops by hand – although it’s a labour-intensive and time-consuming course of.

Whereas adults do feed on the leaves of the plant, it’s their offspring that pose the true hazard. If adults should not managed, they are going to lay copious portions of eggs on the underside of potato (or associated crops’) leaves. As soon as the larvae hatch, they will rapidly decimate a plant and severely stunt or destroy tuber progress.

“Potato beetles are fairly a battle – they’re common,” mentioned Matthews. “(Potatoes) should not one thing I’d advocate making an attempt to develop any amount of with out some technique of controlling (pests).”

The farm has been utilizing Matthews’s machine for a couple of weeks, because the beetles have come into season. The jury remains to be out on precisely how a lot of a distinction it has made, however there was a noticeable distinction within the variety of grownup beetles current day-to-day. The true checks will probably be as soon as the following technology of larvae hatches, which was across the time SaltWire Community visited for this text in late June. The primary spuds harvested from the crop are headed for market in early July.

Matthews is happy with the efficiency of his machine to date and already has plans to enhance it. He wish to develop its attain so it may clear two rows of potatoes at a time, as an alternative of only one, which might significantly cut back the time wanted to cross it over his complete crop.

Life is never straightforward on a farm, so if it takes some tinkering to make issues somewhat smoother – that’s what you need to do, he mentioned.

“There’s one thing about it – when it really works it’s actually rewarding.”

Colin MacLean is a reporter with the SaltWire Community in Prince Edward Island. He could be reached by e-mail at [email protected] and adopted on Twitter @JournalPMacLean.