About 150 potato farmers in New Brunswick are taking the federal government to court over the way it handled a disease in their fields.

In the 1990s, Agriculture Canada set up quarantine zones around potato farms in the Maritimes believed to be infected with the PVYn virus.

Although the disease was never found on some property, people who owned the land ended up with crops they couldn't sell. Not only couldn't they export to foreign markets, they soon found that Canadian buyers weren't interested as well.




"Nobody wanted them," says Neville DeLong, recalling how he watched half a million dollars worth of potatoes rot before his eyes.

DeLong, who eventually lost his farm and his wife, has joined a class-action lawsuit against Ottawa. The producers say Agriculture Canada made mistakes when testing fields for the virus, and failed to compensate people who ended up without markets for perfectly good potatoes.

"We got caught big time. I don't understand why. They were supposed to be in the know. We depended on them," DeLong says.

Neville DeLong
Neville DeLong

"Agriculture Canada didn't do it right," says John Friel, a lawyer who has a room full of boxes he says document the $38 million claim against Ottawa. "Even if they weren't negligent, they didn't do it right."

Testing procedures for PVYn virus were flawed, according to Friel, spewing out "false positives" that destroyed farmers' lives. In 1995, Agriculture Canada admitted "errors in testing" and settled with Prince Edward Island growers for over $15 million, he says.

Federal government officials declined to comment on the lawsuit. But in the past they've said that circumstances in New Brunswick were different from P.E.I., and that other programs have already compensated growers adequately.