Badger Beat Impact of True Potato Seed on the Industry
These are exciting times for potato breeders as they conduct research needed to develop diploid potato breeding lines By Paul Mitchell, Jeff Endelman, Paul Bethke, and Guanming Shi
Commercial potato varieties and elite breeding stocks are technically heterozygous, autotetraploid clones maintained in vitro (i.e., as vegetative plants, not as seeds). The genetic complexity and economics of propagation in this system limit potato breeding in ways that could be reduced if potato were a seed-propagated crop. Diploid potato breeding has the potential to transform potato to a crop with inbred lines that are crossed to generate hybrid true potato seed (TPS), like the system used for hybrid seed corn. This transformation would allow breeders to use new breeding methods to commercialize improved potato cultivars more quickly with desired traits, such as resistance to diseases and pests, improved tolerance to weather-related stresses, and qualities desired by evolving consumer and industry demands. The transformation will have many effects, and this article summarizes our initial thoughts on what changes we expect for the U.S. seed potato industry. In brief, we anticipate that, in the near term, TPS will eliminate firstgeneration seed potato production using mini-tubers and reduce field multiplication by one year, so that commercial potato growers will see new cultivars created a year earlier using these new breeding methods.
see a complete elimination of field multiplication of seed potatoes and a shift to only producing firstgeneration seed potatoes using TPS transplants. SEED POTATO TRENDS The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) publishes annual acreage, yield, and price data for potatoes, but only limited data for seed potatoes (https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/). As expected, seed potato production closely follows potato planted acres for the next year, with both showing a slow declining trend beginning in the mid-1990s. The most recent data report 23 million hundredweight (cwt.) of seed potatoes produced in 2020 and 943,000 acres of potatoes planted in 2021.
calculate the national average use of seed potatoes per planted acre (cwt./ ac). The data show an increasing trend—the three-year average seeding rate for 2019-2021 is 25 cwt./ ac., up from the three-year average rate of 19.5 cwt./ac. for 1985-1987, a 28 percent increase over 35 years. The USDA published seed potato price data only for 2002 through 2014, but for these years, the data show a tight relationship (r2 of 0.998) between the average seed potato price for a year and the average potato price for the previous year (the year the seed potatoes were produced). TWO PRICE REGIMES The seed potato price was on average 1.64 times the potato price for the previous year. Examining the data,
We use these published data to
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Longer term, however, we could BC�T August 61
