Late blight hits North Country crops

By Jon Hochschartner
The deadly fungus which decimated crop yields across the North East this summer had a “pretty bad” effect on local farms as well, Anne Lenox Barlow, a horticulture educator from Clinton County Cornell Cooperative Extension, said.
“(Late blight) is a fungal pathogen that affects tomatoes and potatoes,” Barlow said. “It caused the Irish Potato famine…it gets into xylem and phloem of the plant. What that is, is the plant's vascular system; it’s how it transports water and food. It gets in there and it clogs that all up. So the plant loses its ability to transport food and water. The plants, when they get severely infected, they do wilt, because they're not getting water and they're not getting nutrients.”
She said the pathogen was brought north in June from a large vegetable grower in Texas. But it won’t survive our winter cold, Barlow said.
“It's something we shouldn't hopefully see next year,” she said. “The last time we had it here was the early nineties.”
That is likely little consolation for Dan Tower, of Dan’s Busy Bees and Sandy Hill Vegetables in North Bangor, who said he lost between 50 and 100 bushels of tomatoes when his crop was hit in August.
“I lost somewhere between 95 percent of my tomatoes,” Tower said.
Similarly, Roseanne Gallagher, of Magic Earth Farm in Malone, said she lost all of her potatoes just a month after they were planted.
“For the first time in more than 30 years, we have to buy our potato supply,” she said in an email.
Joe Ellen Saumier, of Kirbside Gardens in Chateaugay, said her 300-feet worth of potatoes were hit in July.
“They looked perfectly healthy one day, and the next week half of them were dead,” she said.
Mike Tholen, the farm manager at North Country School in Lake Placid, said he noticed the blight on his potatoes around mid-August.
“It looked like black lesions, nickel to quarter size, on the leaves, with yellowish-brown dead plant tissue around that under the leaves,” Tholen said. “On some of the stems was a white powdery mildew.”
Tholen said he planted 28 rows, around 300 feet long, of potatoes.
“When we first noticed (the blight), it was on just two rows about a quarter of the way across,” Tholen said. “Then it started spreading through. Within a week it was almost halfway across the field. The suggestion of Cornell Cooperative Extension was to remove all the plant parts that were above ground. We wrapped them in tarps and then weighted them down with cinder blocks. We haven't lost anything, but our (crop) is smaller, because we defoliated before the tubers had a chance to size up.”
Tholen said his tomato crop was unaffected because they are kept in a greenhouse.
Meanwhile, Sylvia Newman, of Valley View Farm in Saranac, said it was simple “luck” that her crops were not hit. She said since there had been little warning, and because the spores travel in the air, there was little they could do by way of prevention.