From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

LEFT: At the research farm,
across the river from the
Florenceville plant. Stephen
McCain of McCain Produce
is front left. Also pictured
are variety development
specialist Gary Hawkins
(fourth from left) and Yves
Leclercq, chief agronomist,
McCain Foods (Canada),
third from right.
rIGhT: Checking out new
varieties at the research farm.
Another disadvantage is that it’s not practical to use irrigation in New Brunswick.
For a processor, the main objective is having a reliable supply of good raw materials
and an irrigated crop delivers that better than a crop dependent on rainfall.
An ideal place to grow potatoes would be one where it never rains during the
growing season, the sun shines every day, and irrigation water is cheap and plentiful,
says Pelletier. A potato crop needs four centimetres of water per week and, on
average, that’s what the skies of New Brunswick deliver. The problem is that sometimes
ten centimetres falls in a single day, followed by three weeks with no rain at all.
Irrigation puts four centimetres on the crop each and every week.
Of course, the Carleton County potato crop could be irrigated with water from the
Saint John River, but that doesn’t make economic sense. It costs too much to install
an irrigation system that might be needed only once or twice a season during dry
spells. Even then, it would be risky to irrigate, says Pelletier, because of Murphy’s Law
– “right after you irrigate, there will be a thunderstorm, resulting in too much water.”
That’s bad, of course, because overwatered potatoes are likely to rot.
McCain eventually figured all this out. That’s why there is a McCain plant in
Othello, Washington, one of the best places in the world to grow potatoes. It is located
in the semi-desert region east of the Cascade Mountains. Because it is so dry
there, growers can control, through irrigation, how much water the crop gets, and
the long growing season is perfect for Russet Burbanks. Ideally, a Russet Burbank
crop will get from 130 to 140 growing days, but in New Brunswick, it has only 120.
Nevertheless, advances in agronomy are allowing New Brunswick farmers to grow
the variety successfully.
“McCain has made a huge investment to learn how to grow and store that variety,”
Pelletier says. “For example, we have agronomists going into storages with
CO2 meters to see if there is enough fresh air. This was unheard of fifteen years ago.
So, because of the technology, the Russet Burbank is now doing pretty well in New
Brunswick.” But the yield in eastern Canada can’t compete with that in Washington
state. In New Brunswick, the growers have to put in fewer plants per hectare to give
their potatoes a chance to grow to a decent size during the short growing season. So
the commercial yield in New Brunswick is about thirty metric tons per hectare, compared
with Othello’s sixty-five.
If Florenceville was not the easiest place to grow potatoes, it was also not the perfect
location for the headquarters of a large multinational corporation. In 1988, the
Toronto Star asked Harrison McCain to explain why McCain Foods was based in a
rural village rather than a major business centre such as Toronto.
136 f rom the Ground up
the home front 137
LEFT: Crop rotation trial on
Prince Edward Island.
rIGhT: Clarence and Eil
Waldner of Brookdale,
Manitoba, the 2005 McCain
champion potato growers
for Carberry, Manitoba.