British Columbia potato farmers prefer dry harvest conditions

With a dry August and September, and little or no rain forecast for the next 14 days or so, Ladner potato farmer Peter Guichon is not too concerned about this year's harvesting conditions.

Go back 24 months or so on the calendar and it was a much different story.


That was when heavy rains ruined about 3,000 acres of crops in the Lower mainland, most of it potatoes mired in mud and next to impossible to harvest.

"Two years ago was a disaster,"says Guichon who runs Felix Farms, one of B.C.’s largest producers of vegetables with 900 acres, adding he'd rather deal with the problems of dry conditions than with what took place in 2010 and the spring of 2011 when wet weather hampered planting crops.