hello welcome to Kate's Ag today i'm here with Kevin Vander Kooi a research technician at the
University of Guelph and today we are in Ontario Canada at the Holland Marsh and you are going to
be explaining to me everything you do here which is so incredible thank you thank you welcome
yeah so we work at the University of Guelph mostly on carrots and onions
and a few other minor crops celery lettuce we do a little bit of
coal crop work and things like that and we're going to go and have a look at
the different soil type that we have here and just go through some of the crops that we that we grow
yes that's very interesting and what is Holland Marsh really known for so Holland Marsh is known
as the salad bowl of Canada historically we've grown a lot of lettuce and celery
we're only 45 minutes from Toronto and most of the crops that we grow
are are sold and packed here and then shipped to Toronto or around Canada so we grow about 45
of uh Canada's carrots and onions wow that's amazing yeah so the crops that we grow are
usually planted in the spring so we start to start growing the end of april beginning of may and then
onions are harvested in September and carrots are usually harvested the end of October into November
before the the soils get too cold and the and the weather gets wet it gets cold so that's really
interesting you have a similar growing season to what we have in Montana yeah so we have winter on
the ground freezes we get snow in most years and that limits our seasons so we have one crop of uh
onions and one crop of carrots some of the smaller crops we can get up to four crops of say asian
vegetables um but lettuce and celery we get one crop of celery as well uh carrots are sorry the
lettuce we can get two or three crops depending on on when they're planted so we do some transplants
um onions are transplanted early to get an early start on the market so they'll be harvested
um in early August and then also transplant celery is also done early in order to get a start
early start to the markets as well and how much rainfall do you need to
have produce these crops so the rainfall for onions is basically about an inch a week
25 millimeters but in the last two weeks we had three and a half inches of rain we might not get
it rain for another a few a few weeks from that so our soil is very unique um it used to be a marsh
um water used to be above our heads and we had you know trees and sedges and things were here
and as in the 19 late 20s they drained it they built a dike around the outside
and and drained the marsh and people started growing crops mostly vegetables what makes it
unique is it's made up of basically uh decomposed plant materials so on your farm Kate you might
have one or two percent organic matter we have 70 80 organic matter in some cases that's crazy
that makes it really good for growing um root crops like carrots and onions which
the soil is very loose there's no stones in it and it allows crops to grow easily through there
so it's generally low in nutrients so we do have to add fertilizer or we have added fertilizer
to help produce a crop but it makes it it also has a very high old water holding
capacity um due to the fact that it used to be a marsh so um your farm you might pick
stones that's a job in the spring at our farm in the marsh here people pick stumps wow yes we're
picking rocks rolling rocks doing everything we can to get rid of where we are we're picking them
up so they don't impact um the growing of the crop or um impact the harvest equipment in the fall
yes that's really interesting that you're not picking rocks you're picking wood yes yes
very interesting so so what crop are we looking at right now so here we're looking at a crop of head
lettuce that we grew from transplant so it's about four weeks old and maybe about two or three weeks
from harvest right now very cool the idea behind this crop is in the background there
you can see that black machine is actually an autonomous uh vehicle called the it's built by
Nexus a Canadian company and it's it's name is the the Chevra or the goat that's amazing in english
so the idea behind the the the crops we have here is we're trying to teach the robot um how
to identify weeds and then it can pick the weeds it's got robotic arms that it can
pick weeds with and then we're also trying to teach the robot to identify pests and diseases
um that it can then relay that information and we can teach it how to spot problems it'll put a
reference point and people can go and look to see what that issue actually is that is so incredible
and extremely helpful for moving forward within agriculture hopefully that that's the goal um so
we're looking at the the robot on three different crops we're looking at on lettuce there's also a
plot of onions and also a plot of carrots oh okay and would the robot be able to assess the crop
and and the weeds in all of those different crops yes so once it learns what the difference between
say a lettuce is and this pigweed it doesn't need to know that it's a pigweed but it knows that it
looks different from the crop wow that's fascinating the robot learns what the crop is
and then is designed to remove anything that isn't the crop very very cool and how does it look for
pests so there is a camera mounted to the front of it which we can look at at a little more detail
the idea is that it takes a picture of that and then we can process the images
and then we can identify the the problem on the plant and then it can develop an algorithm
that will identify that as that problem wow and so this is the soil you have here
and how is it different from soil you would see in other fields so this soil as i said earlier
is beta made up of organic material it was a marsh so it's basically decomposed plant material
it's very lightweight it has a very low bulk density compared to yes i noticed that so much
different from our soil in Montana right so it has a very high water holding capacity since it was
a piece of an organic peat soil that's really cool one issue that we have with the soil is that once
you expose it to oxygen so once it was drained it naturally wants to subside which is a phenomenon
known to organic soils that when it's exposed to oxygen it it it oxidizes and then disappears so
there's a few ways that we can use to control that from or minimize that from happening one
is keeping the water table up higher um applying cover crops we have problems with wind and dust
storms so it will actually blow away um both in the spring when the crops are small and also in
the winter so applying cover crops in the fall can also help minimize that but every time we
harvest a crop we're also taking a little bit of soil with us um so we have different
types of machinery that will help minimize the amount of soil that's taken out of the field
but maybe in 50 years the soil might be might have disappeared that's crazy to think about yes
so the good thing is when i started here almost 30 years ago they said there was about 30 years left
of of soil 30 years later we still have soil we're still able to grow crops it's not great that's
great so that's a good thing i think definitely yeah and how do you harvest lettuce crops
is it all by hand lettuce is harvested mostly by hand they might have a harvest aid that will help
sort of with the packaging but most of it is you're on your hands and knees and cut by hand
and what variety of lettuce is this this is a variety called Mighty Joe is that normally
what you would see in stores or at fresh local with most vegetable crops it's very different is
there's different varieties for different seasons or for different growing regions so you could have
multiple varieties growing depending on the season whether it's cooler in the spring or
hot the ones that do better uh in the heat of the summer it all depends on on the season or the or
the climate that you're growing in would this be the only variety you usually typically only grow
this variety just because it's it's very suited for this area definitely and how long would it
normally take you to harvest this plot so this plot would maybe take um maybe only in an hour
the difference between what we do and what growers do is we're usually only taking small samples out
of a larger for research so a lot of the other research that we do involves crop protection
materials so we're trying to get registered new chemicals registered for growers that are either
more pest specific or are better on the environment that they're safer
for people to use or have you know less harmful effects uh to people that are
uh that people that eat them so completely and what would most of the research you do
on this field before or this part particular robot oh this is all for the robot wow yeah
so we can look at some of the other fields and we can actually explain some of the other
crops that we're doing as well yes that would be awesome since we're part of the
University we also have graduate students that are completing their masters or PhDs and part of
what they do is are part of what what we do is conduct their field research uh at the research
station here so we have various equipment out here uh used to monitor uh a pest called Stem
Philium Leaf Blade of onions so we're looking at different parameters to help predict disease
is there anything specific you have to do with the soil or the area that you are conducting
or the plot you are conducting research at no we usually treat it as a commercial as a commercial
grower would so we do all the same things in terms of uh fertilizing and herbicide work and
things like that and then we are the differences we have are on the treatments that we do uh either
with a fungicide or insecticide depending on the pests that we're dealing with and you're really
the reason agriculture moves forward because farmers can look at your research and and all
of the hard work you put in and and see how crops can produce more and be less susceptible
to diseases and and what you can do in the future to have a better and higher-yielding harvest yeah
so that's the idea behind our research is to help growers improve their management of
different pests and diseases that's great and thank you for your work all right thank you