o Breeding pioneer Niek Vos pushes the boundaries TRADE AND MARKETING Phytophthora three years in a row. That wasn’t only damaging to us, but also created a very negative image for organic farming as a whole. That’s why I decided to grow only resistant varieties. The first variety I tried out, almost 20 years ago, was the Escort, at the time a Wolf & Wolf variety. That didn’t last very long though, because the variety was only resistant for a short time. In 2001, the Louis Bolk institute (LBI) in Zeist told us that the variety’s resistance had ceased.’ There was no replacement, so Vos decided to start breeding and searching for resistant variants himself. No easy task, and also a lengthy and costly one. However, Vos was not easily deterred. He approached breeding and trading company Meijer in Rilland with his plan in order to be able to start with the necessary breeding material. What he still needed now was a pot of money. The future organic breeder decided to write a letter to the Ministry with a question and a promise: ‘Give me one million guilders, and I’ll give you a Phytophthora-resistant potato variety within 10 years. They phoned me immediately after receiving the letter. Not with a promise, but with the message that things didn’t work like that. However, they didn’t immediately reject my request: a few days later, two men arrived at the farm to have a look around, because they were quite interested.’ As it turned out, Vos needed a broader basis, which is why he contacted Professor Edith Lammerts van Bueren of the LBI. She immediately supported Vos’s plan, but even together they were not able to raise sufficient funds. ‘She still had to fight for another five years before she obtained the necessary budget to develop breeding material. This was partly thanks to Evert Waalkens, a Member of Parliament, who thought that the sector needed to hedge its bets for a possible solution to the Phytophthora problem: cisgenesis - currently the DURPH project, which had just received 10 million euros - and organic breeding. And this was the beginning of BioImpuls, for which we received 1 million euros six years ago.’ Do our own marketing By the time that Vos was able to capitalise on this, he had been breeding for 7 years. And that was when the Bionica emerged. ‘A coincidence, that’s how things go. You’re selecting 8,000 clones every year. Mainly wild material, from which it was quite difficult to select a useable potato. I sometimes had the feeling that I was only busy with genitor development. However, I did find a suitable and very strong clone. A whitefleshed variety with quite substantial Phytophthora resistance. After finding it, the Meijer trading company first tried for three years to get it marketed, but that failed. It was apparently difficult for them to find a suitable market within Western Europe. That’s why they stopped, but I thought it a missed opportunity for both the sector and for myself. The variety was registered on the national Varieties List in 2009. That was a special occasion and recognition of the breeding work I’d done. By growing my own seed and consumption crops I’d also found out that it was an easy potato for an organic crop farmer. It always grows nicely in the right size, is not susceptible to viruses and doesn’t contract Phytophthora. After saying goodbye to Meijer, I decided to start marketing the Bionica by myself. We started to grow seed on a bigger scale and took up packaging and marketing ourselves. The result is that our seed potato acreage has expanded to 3.5 hectares. This means that we maintain all the links and are able to manage things like turnover and quality ourselves’, Vos explains the strategy. ow Phytophthora-resistant varieties, says Niek Vos (r) is his daughter Liselore.. Marketing under brand name To stimulate consumption in the Netherlands, Vos decided to market the Bionica under a brand name. ‘The supermarket customers seem to prefer that and that’s why we picked the name ‘Niek’s Witte’. We deliberately chose to name the white colour of the flesh. Dutch consumers and supermarket buyers are inclined to go for yellow-fleshed table potatoes. They associate white with not much flavour’, Vos says with regret. The fact that the Vos family - son Michiel and daughter Liselore now also work in the company - was awarded the prestigious Hero of Taste prize in 2012 was proof that the taste is okay, but it hasn’t yet led to extra turnover in the Netherlands. ‘That’s why we want to go abroad, to countries where white-fleshed potaPotato World 2014 • number 3 25 Pagina 24

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