Imagine what it would be like if once a year, you were to open up your mailbox to find a small package, perhaps even a simple envelope, labeled “Potato Seed.”
That’s the vision of the folks at Tuberosum Technologies, Inc. in Broderick, Saskatchewan. The potato breeding and development company has been working since its inception in 1995 to make potatoes more efficient and sustainable, and true potato seed (TPS) has been at the heart of that mission since 2005.
“The potato is a pretty amazing crop,” says Tuberosum general manager Joel VanderSchaaf. “It’s a very, very efficient crop. It even gets more efficient when you study it in terms of how it has developed and evolved on its own.”
Most people in the potato industry probably know and understand that some varieties of potato plant naturally produce small fruit, each containing hundreds of tiny botanical seeds. Whereas clonal potato propagation of commercial varieties produces about 10 seed pieces per tuber, a single potato plant can yield as many as 5,000 botanical seeds—much more rapid multiplication.
“When we started, we looked at the potato and thought, you can multiply it using clonal propagation,” says VanderSchaaf. “But we realized that there’s also a botanical seed part of the potato, and that sparked our interest.”
Tuberosum recognized early on that inherent efficiencies existed in working with TPS and developed its breeding plan around developing a hybrid TPS variety that could be grown commercially. The founders set up shop in Saskatchewan for several reasons, not the least of which was the relatively challenging climate. The short growing season and long, hot summer days help the company weed out any “weaker” varieties from its lineup. “The idea when we’re doing our breeding work here,” says VanderSchaaf, “is that anything that excels under these conditions should excel anywhere. We’ve basically developed our varieties to where if it can’t grow within our season, we don’t select it.”
VanderSchaaf doesn’t make any presumptions that TPS will spark a revolution in the North American potato industry, but the advantages afforded by this type of propagation aren’t hard to see. In contrast to clonal propagation, which could take several years of multiplication to bring seed prices in line with supply, TPS has the potential to be economical the first year of use. “Each one of those years, you’re leaving yourself at risk of crop loss, to some extent,” says VanderSchaaf. “With TPS you could produce the seed, plant it, and sell it to consumers the next year.”
The decreased storage and transportation cost of TPS versus traditional seed potatoes is obvious. “Essentially, 100 grams of seed could replace about 3 tons of potatoes,” says VanderSchaaf. “It’s very high-generation seed. It’s very clean; there’s almost no disease that can be transferred from the tuber to the seed.”
Of course, commercial TPS production isn’t without its challenges. There is currently no registration process in either the U.S. or Canada for seed growers to sell TPS to commercial growers, something Tuberosum is working to change. On top of that, many popular varieties simply don’t produce fruit and true seed. And some have expressed skepticism over the genetic variation—and its inherent uncertainty—that naturally comes with TPS, an issue with which clonal propagation by definition doesn’t have to contend, “but commercial uniformity is what we’ve been breeding for, so that the potato plants that come from seed essentially all look and act the same,” says VanderSchaaf “We’re looking for that threshold of uniformity where the consumer is happy with the performance. Beyond that, we like a little bit of variation.”
That variation, too, has the potential to salvage a crop when, for example, a debilitating disease comes through, VanderSchaaf says. “If a disease like late blight comes through, a clonal variety where all the genes are identical and susceptible to late blight makes it easy for the disease to spread throughout the field. But when there’s genetic variation in the field, the disease can’t spread as quickly.”
Commercial production isn’t necessarily Tuberosum’s primary destination for its TPS varieties. With the technique’s built-in efficiencies, VanderScaaf believes that true seed propagation of potatoes can have far-reaching effects around the world. “There are places in the world that currently can’t afford the expensive infrastructure you need to grow potato the way we do in North America and Europe,” he says. “True potato seed would be accessible to them. There’d be fewer phytosanitary constraints because you could actually ship seed in bags or envelopes to places that need it, and they’d be able to grow very high-quality potato crops. It has huge implications for a lot of these countries, and I think that originally the spirit in research of TPS was to supply the most efficient food crop in the world to people who didn’t have access to it.”
Efficiency, when all is said and done, is the battle cry of Tuberosum Technologies. That’s why they chose to work with such a crop as the potato in the first place. “We’re just trying to take the most efficient food crop in the world and make it more efficient,” says VanderSchaaf. “We’ve seen the results, and we know what’s possible.” cipated in USPB’s culinary seminar at the Culinary Institute of America last year have tested or added new potato items to their menus.
And that’s the goal: One plate, one table at a time, USPB is getting more potatoes where they belong—into the bellies of satisfied consumers.