Manitoba potato harvest expected to hit records

Nov 03, 2023

After several years of below-average to poor harvests, Manitoba potato growers have finally caught a break.

“There have been some challenging years, so it’s nice to have a strong, good-quality crop,” said Susan Ainsworth, general manager of the Keystone Potato Producers Association. “They were due for a good crop.”

Why it matters: Potato yields were strong this year and all producers expect to fulfil their contracts.

According to projections, Manitoba’s final production numbers won’t just be good. They’re expected to be top tier.

The third-quarter report from the United Potato Growers of Canada put the province’s 2023 production at a record 28.2 million hundredweight, up 8.1 per cent from 2022.

It’s a stark contrast to what potato farmers have endured since 2018, a year when 5,200 acres were left in the ground due to wet harvest conditions. In 2019, winter came early, leaving roughly 12,000 acres in the ground. Storage losses compounded the issue.

In 2020 and 2021, it was drought. Contracts went unfulfilled. Last year, late seeding from a wet spring led to yet another disappointing year.

Despite consecutive years of challenges, figures showed 81,000 acres of potatoes were planted this year in Manitoba, a slight increase from the 79,500 in 2022. Harvested acres were predicted at 80,757, with yields expected to be average to above average at approximately 350 cwt. per acre.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids