CULTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY Variety presentation 2012: in search of innovations Coincidence and answers to questions, that’s all do: there has to have been a burglary first before they can start tracking down the burglars. And show me one company in our branch that starts developing new things without there being a clear reason for it. Companies that claim to do just that are merely telling good sales stories. What all of us are doing is nothing less than developing things when they’re needed. The market demands and we have to comply. What I’d think a real innovation in potatoes, for example, is if you were able to cross AM resistance into a Bintje. Bintje is still a very important variety, isn’t it? Many people are against it, but if you could remove just a few bad characteristics, you’d have the ideal, versatile variety. What we simply have as new here, are answers to questions from the market. The Luciana is the most recent example of this. The market in Southern Europe has been asking for a replacement for the Agata variety. They want a comparable variety with a higher yield and more taste. Our Luciana variety has all that, because it links a high yield to an excellent taste, and it has a good shape and a smooth skin. So, not an innovation but the answer to a request from the market.’ Our traditional profession is innovative in itself ‘I think that in our sector innovation hasn’t really been addressed in the past ten years. I’m sure I’m saying the wrong thing again and I can already hear others thinking, “there’s that Buwalda again”, but this is how I look at it’, is how Lammert Buwalda of potato trading house Semagri in Nagele responds to this key question. ‘The varieties that are currently top of the market have come up by accident. Look, you could call the development of resistance to wart disease in the starch sector an innovation, but I think that it’s simply a matter of taking action against a necessary evil, because otherwise you could no longer grow potatoes in certain areas. You can compare that with the work the police ‘We’re innovating all the time’, breeder Peter Keizer answers when asked what innovation means for potato breeding company Fobek in Sint Annaparochie. ‘Our profession is in itself innovating, because we develop new varieties. We follow trends, or rather, we stack trends. One such trend, which has attracted the national media, is our developing of salttolerant varieties. What we’re especially proud of is that we’ve now been able to develop a test for determining the salttolerance level of varieties. So, it has now become possible to give marks to varieties. In addition, we’ve been able to draw up a damage ratio, which enables us to show the degree of damage to potatoes when the crop is exposed to high salt levels. The damage ratios are useful for growers as well as insurers and water boards. It can be used to determine the costs in euros of a certain percentage of salinity. Potato World 2013 • number 3 15 Pagina 14

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