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Manure put potato growth ‘into hyper speed,’ says Canadian scientists

Earlier this year, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) brought back its Plowdown Challenge, a call to Canadian farmers to work toward an even more sustainable agriculture sector through beneficial management practices.

P.E.I. organic vegetable farmer Matt Dykerman was the winner by guessing the correct yield of potatoes grown in Charlottetown using manure and leftover nitrogen from a cover crop instead of commercial fertilizer. Dykerman’s guess of 275 hundredweight per acre, which was closest to the final result of 293 hundredweight per acre. The yield was strikingly close to the 2024 estimated P.E.I. average (304.7) for potatoes. And, at 293, the 2024 yield was 73 per cent higher than last year’s crop, when no manure was used.

The challenge was hosted by AAFC’s Charlottetown Research and Development Centre and was conceived in 2023 by AAFC knowledge transfer specialists Scott Anderson and Roger Henry. That year, Anderson and Henry planted the Mountain Gem potato variety on a field without using traditional fertilizers following a cover crop of red clover at AAFC’s Harrington Research Farm, located on P.E.I. The crop relied on leftover nitrogen from the soil and cover crop.

This year’s challenge added manure as a twist. Like last year’s challenge, farmers were encouraged to guess the potato yield of these fields.

Anderson said in a statement that manure “put the potato plant grown into hyper speed” when combined with the nutrients left over from the red clover crop. The result was good-sized, uniform potatoes that would be ideal for table stock or processing.

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