vue - Mechanical Potato Bug Picker - Canada Agriculture and Food Museum

A potato farmer must constantly battle the potato bug. These undesirable yellow and black beetles are detrimental to the health of the potato crop. The bugs eat the leaves, an important source for capturing light from the sun so that the potato plant can produce nutrients. If the leaves are eaten the result is a stunted plant, which will produce smaller and fewer potatoes. Before the use of pesticides, farmers had to pick the bugs off the potato leaves by hand, a time-consuming and inefficient method. In the 1890s Allan Hunter, a Prince Edward Island inventor devised a machine to replace this inefficient method which he produced and sold to the local farmers. Hunter's Bug Picker was a device that the farmer rolled between the rows of potato plants. The paddles on either side of the machine whacked the leaves, hitting the bugs off the leaves and into a tray of kerosene below, thus killing the bugs. As was common with small equipment manufacturing companies of the 19th century, the Bug Picker was produced, sold and used locally in Prince Edward Island. This particular Bug Picker is one of only a few still left in existence. It signifies the important contribution of Prince Edward Island to the potato industry of Canada and the innovativeness of Canadians in the agriculture industry.