When Hendrik Bakker immigrated with his family to Alberta from the Netherlands in 1988, he immediately set to work doing what he had always done: growing seed potatoes. There were differences, to be sure, between farming in the Netherlands and farming in Canada, but the Bakker family is nothing if not resourceful. If they could grow potatoes in their old home, they could certainly succeed at it in their new home. It wasn’t long before they were operating a successful farm a few miles west of Edmonton and shipping potato seed all over North America.
Yet Hendrik kept thinking about those differences. Alberta had been good to the family, and the farm was thriving, but he felt he could bring more to the table. The most obvious contrast was in the respective types of potatoes grown and marketed on either side of the Atlantic. In Europe, his customers had always wanted elongated, yellow-fleshed potatoes. Canadian and American growers and consumers largely looked for uniform, rounder, red- and russet-skinned varieties with white flesh. Most of his customers had never heard of the potato cultivars he had grown up growing and eating.
But as Hendrik grew to understand more and more about North American potato growers and consumers, he came to believe that those varieties from his youth could translate on this side of the pond. Using his connections in Europe, he gradually began integrating European varieties into his Canadian seed farm.
“It really started more as a hobby,” explains Hendrik’s son, Phil. “Through having successful seed farm and having our contacts in Europe, we were able to bring over unique varieties from Europe my father had experience with. That was fairly foreign at the time in North America, where most of the varieties were being bred by universities. It was not a common concept to be bringing European varieties in.”
Common or not, it caught on. In 1996, the Bakkers founded Solanum International, a company dedicated to introducing and marketing different potato varieties in the North American market. The Bakkers call Solanum International a “variety search engine,” with the stated goal of pairing its marketing partners with varieties that are uniquely suited for their respective operations.
Ideal Environment
Situated some 850 miles due north of southern Idaho’s famous volcanic soil and 750 miles from the fertile fields of the Columbia Basin, the Edmonton area might appear a little too arctic for high-volume potato production. But in the Bakkers’ minds, that high latitude is a significant part of Solanum’s success.
“The northern Alberta climate is ideal for high-generation seed potato production,” says Phil. “We have such cold winters, the next year you don’t see any volunteers in the fields, so virus pressure is very, very low.”
“In the Edmonton area, there is no processing industry,” adds Hendrik. “That’s a good thing for us because the processing industry usually uses lower-class seed, which has more potential for carrying diseases. So we have no contamination whatsoever because we are an isolated seed area.”
Solanum International doesn’t do any actual breeding, but it keeps an inventory of about 40 varieties in production. All the company’s seed starts out in greenhouses as mini-tubers. Solanum contracts with seven high-generation seed growers in the Edmonton area, with 200 to 300 acres of Solanum seed grown each year. To further avoid disease pressure in the early stages of production, Solanum tasks its growers with planting seed whole rather than cutting the seed tubers.
Matching Up
The Bakkers realize there are reasons different potato varieties have thrived in different parts of the world. They don’t expect to change overnight—or even over the course of years—the eating habits of consumers or the agronomic traditions of potato growers in their adopted homeland simply by offering some shiny new product. For starters, many popular European varieties simply don’t grow all that well in American potato-producing areas.
However, that street goes both ways. The Solanum International team spends a lot of time traveling the world looking for new and promising varieties, and they’ve learned that someone else’s skepticism regarding a certain cultivar may prove to mean little in a different part of the world. The Netherlands is a huge player in worldwide variety development, and the Bakkers have developed strong relationships with several Dutch breeders.
“We’ve told them over the years not to throw out certain varieties,” says Phil, “because they have market potential in North America. It’s a relationship of bouncing ideas back and forth, giving them more information so they can select the right varieties for our needs as well as the needs in Europe.”
In the past, the Bakkers felt they really had to push their product to get any traction in North America. But as consumer tastes have changed and growers’ stoic traditionalism have softened over the last few years, the roles have reversed: Solanum now receives a pull from the market for its varieties.
“People we approach with fingerlings, creamers and exotics are now saying, ‘Yep, this is exactly what we’re looking for,’” says Phil. “They recognize that it is a growing segment, and they want in.”
This article appears in the January 2017 issue of Potato Grower.