Potatoes – the hidden world of the humble spud
It’s that time of the year again, when you know that spring is about to happen as the mud in the tractor turns to dust! At last we have some dry, albeit cold, weather to mark the start of the season. Nature reminds us of the coming long days and intense schedule that lies ahead in the pursuit of food growing. With longer days and warmer weather, the pace quickens with everyone busy in fields and garden. Already we have thousands of baby plants sitting in the shelter of the ancient greenhouse, Hardwick’s oldest working building. Growing happily in their homemade compost, waiting to be moved to their final growing positions, skilfully tended to and cared for by Maria the propagator.
In the field, I have started cultivation in preparation for planting the 15,000 potato tubers that will hopefully, with the right conditions, give us 15 tonnes or so of staple crop. This is an important one for us, as we are able to sell all of them without too much difficulty. In the UK, our spud consumption per person is around 70kg per year, so we will have enough from the acre we plant to feed at least 200 people for a year. In reality, we tend to run out by end of March, as we do not have the cold storage needed to keep the crop in good condition right up to late June, when we harvest our first potato of the year.
It is hard to imagine life without the humble spud. But before the middle of the 16th century they were not grown at all in Britain. Turnips would have filled the gap. Difficult to make attractive, it’s easy to see why spuds took off to become the most commonly eaten vegetable. In Ukraine they really love their spuds, even more than us, with an annual consumption of around 180kg!
We grow a range of varieties to give us several different types and colours of skin and flesh. Every variety has its own unique characteristics, of flavour, texture, yield, resistance or susceptibility to pest and diseases and a host of other attributes. For us the resistance to potato blight is especially important. When we first started growing potatoes commercially almost 50 years ago, blight was a major risk. We would, in some years, have to accept losing up to half the crop, due to this persistent disease.
Various breeding programmes in UK and Europe were developing varieties with resistance to blight. During the 80’s we ran a number of research trials with The National Institute of Botany (NIAB) to assess disease resistance within an organic system. They needed sites that were not using chemical sprays to mask the disease. Some resistant varieties were found and the breeding programmes were moving in the right direction. Disease resistance is not just about blight: potatoes are subject to a vast number of other diseases too with lovely names such as scab, scurf, blackleg, gangrene, wart disease, spraing, cyst nematode, the list is endless. So the plant breeders need to check for the resistance of all these diseases too, it is a skilled job.
We now have a choice of many newer (past 25 years) varieties with very high resistance to blight. This has been a major factor in our ability to produce well over 2x the yields we would have managed decades ago. Some of the best varieties came from the superb breeding programmes that were established in Ukraine during the Soviet era. the ending of which allowed the technology to migrate to farms in the west. We are all in a much better place with regards to food security due to these hugely improved varieties.
The next time you sit down to a plate of beans and chips just ponder on the complexity of the work that has gone into your lovely food. From the years of selective breeding and trials, to the farm where fertility is built into the living soil, and sweat and toil it takes to produce one of the worlds most valuable foods.
