LAKEVILLE, N.S. — Philip Keddy says while climate change is creating a host of problems, drier summers and warmer temperatures have created good conditions in Nova Scotia for growing a traditionally southern crop: sweet potatoes.
Charles Keddy Farms in Lakeville first planted the crop in 2006, working plots for four years to try various techniques.
“They hadn’t been grown here before, so it was more experimental at that time,” Keddy said.
“It was said that they couldn’t be grown here, and we wanted to prove that they could be.”
A previous attempt 25 years ago at a different farm was unsuccessful.
The farm has been growing the crop commercially for the past six years, selling to Sobeys, to the tune of up to 800,000 kilograms annually.
The initial decision to try the crop was partly because of the large labour force the farm had. The sweet potato planting and harvesting happens at off-times to other crops, so it was a way to keep the workers on the job during their work period.
It was also the opportunity, he said, because no one else was growing them.
Learning curve
It didn’t start off well.
“In the first four years we grew them they were long and spindly, and nowhere close to the shape and size that we grow today,” Keddy said. “In those first years none of them, really, would have met market standards. Some of them went to the Halifax market through a small vendor and the rest went to cow food.”
In year five, they knew they had to make a decision on whether to continue on or not. They ordered more shoots — called slips — from a single source, and increased practices around fertility and irrigation.
“We grew a beautiful crop to sell to the retail stores, but by the time we started to wash it just after Christmas, it had been stored in one of our conventional warehouses and we ran into spoilage issues because they weren’t being kept in the right climate and they all rotted.”
He and his father went a step further, and travelled to North Carolina to see how they stored and harvested sweet potatoes so they could build the right type of warehouse.
Since then, they’ve had good quality potatoes to put to market.
That first warehouse, built in 2012, was supposed to look after the crop for 10 years, but as production increased within three years they had to build another.
“The growth in acres and pounds in the last six years has been rapid,” Keddy said.
He said climate change seems to be a part of that.
“The hottest, driest years are our best output,” Keddy said. “As the climate continues to change and our summers maintain hot weather and falls are warm into mid October... the crop is thriving.”
He said the Annapolis Valley “creates the hot, humid, sticky environment” that the crop likes, which isn’t present in other parts of the Maritimes.
But climate change isn’t all good, he said. The late freeze last June cost the farm 20 per cent of its crop.
Experimenting with melons
Outside Canning, Andy Vermeulen of Vermeulen Farms is also growing a crop that is normally found at more southern latitudes.
He started growing cantaloupes as an experiment, and in 2010 several days of 30 C weather in late August gave him a great year. But the next year, he said, was wet and saw a much lower yield.
Last summer, after the June freeze, he went through the fields and saw gaps where plants were lost to the cold.
“Last year we had the highest yield since 2010, and that was after we lost 40 per cent of the field,” he said. That was a result of the high heat during the optimal growth time for the melons.
Vermeulen has been growing cantaloupes for 15 years. Like Keddy, “we just saw an opportunity in it.” He said another local farmer had been growing and selling to Boston, so he decided to give it a try.
He grows eight to 10 hectares, and we’re having more success now because I have little more experience in when it will be ready.”
He said there is only a short marketing window for the melons, which he sells to local markets in the Maritimes. Going with much more acreage than that would mean having to go further afield to Ontario or Boston for customers.
The main crop starts to come off the fields to grocery retailers by mid-August and are done by early September, which usually fits into a schedule that follows the end of an Ontario crop.
But Vermeulen isn’t convinced that climate change is behind the cantaloupe’s success.
“I think its just the natural variability of the weather,” he said.
RELATED
