Features Production Research
Technological progress

Enter any small town Canadian
doughnut shop or café, corner an elderly-looking gentleman wearing a
farm equipment supplier ball cap, ask him about the history of
agriculture and you’re sure to get a story filled with back-breaking
work.

Enter any small town Canadian doughnut shop or café, corner an elderly-looking gentleman wearing a farm equipment supplier ball cap, ask him about the history of agriculture and you’re sure to get a story filled with back-breaking work.

Tales of stifling hot weather, clouds of annoying insects, blister-caked hands, ornery work horses and pittance wages are usually the norm. Farm work was hard work.

Fast forward to current day. Farm work is still hard work but it certainly doesn’t compare to 50 years ago or maybe even 25.

During a recent potato field day in Ontario, growers crowded around shiny, new examples of the latest in potato production technology. They sported digital readouts, microprocessors, and global positioning technology. Located adjacent to these state-of-the-art field tools were examples from the past – rust speckled workhorses, some sporting steel wheels and seed hoppers made of wood. The growers ran their hands over the flecked paint, remembering younger days spent clinging to a cold, steel seat, ensuring every hill hole had a seed piece dropped into it. Or holding burlap bags at the chute end of a one-row digger. While a six-wheeled behemoth purred in a nearby field, antennas poking from the top of its cab like a 250-horsepower porcupine, growers recalled 35-horsepower B250s or Ford 8Ns, chugging through 50-acre fields.

There’s something romantic about agriculture’s past, the hard work, the sweat, the well-earned aching back. It’s a badge of honour to have lived through the humbling experience of gathering harvested potatoes by hand, dragging a bushel basket behind as you crawled down the row on hands and knees.

Of course, you’d be hard pressed to find a grower who wished to return to those days. Technology is attractive – the gadgets, the horsepower, the speed – all of it geared to making you feel comfortable while getting the work done better and faster and, hopefully, at a profit.

This issue of Fruit & Vegetable Magazine features some recent examples of agricultural technology at its best. Readers can travel to Nova Scotia and learn of a new tractor-mounted device aimed at eliminating the threat of sclerotinia rot in carrot production. Or visit W.P. Griffin Inc., a potato producer in P.E.I. with one of the most state-of-the-art  packaging and washing plants in North America. Or read-up about the newest development in vegetable plant propagation – grafting.

For those nostalgic for the days of old, this issue also features an article examining modern-day carrot production but without the current-day need for chemicals.

Enjoy this look at the future, with a brief glimpse back at the past.