CULTIVATION AND TECHNOLOGY Variety presentation 2012: in search of innovations Being different and looking ahead, together with the customer ‘When you ask what innovation means for our company, I must make a distinction between the sales and the breeding divisions’, breeder Guus Heselmans of Meijer Potato in Rilland answers. ‘For sales and marketing it’s important that they offer produce and services with which you can stand out compared to others, and with which you look ahead together with the customer. That’s the way you can be innovative, I think. Together with the customer, you make sure that your good quality seed ends up where it should be. If you don’t do that, you create losses. It’s all about what you know, you must use that. What’s also important is that you make well-considered choices. It’s important to share the innovation results with the rest of the company: breeders with salesmen and vice versa. We’re not a fairy-tale island that keeps inventing new things, then leaves the sales department to try and cope with them. If we, as breeders, come up with new varieties, it’s important that this is the result of a demand from within the company which, in turn, is a response to requests from the chain. Search for improvement Harry van der Vijver, export manager of Germicopa from Quimper (France), sees the variety presentation week as an excellent opportunity to present his French breeding business to the established seed potato companies of the Netherlands. In order to be successful in this, together with Dutch partner Hapotex, the company has found accommodation at Dirk van de Water’s potato trading company ATF in Lemmer. According to Van de Vijver, innovation is a search for improvement of the variety package. ‘You’re in search of varieties that do better than the existing ones. We’re looking at presentation, resistance and yield. Besides the well-known old breeding techniques, marker technology has become an important component of selection.’ Subsequently, it’s important that the breeding result is placed on the market in exactly the right way. An example of innovation in breeding is our variety classification system. This doesn’t talk about gross tons per hectare, but about the final product per hectare. We’ve made a film, which shows how this works with a variety such as Lady Anna. This is a variety with lots of wonderful characteristics, but the ultimate profit is found in its enormous yield. During the film, you can see that the variety has a high dry-matter content, a proper distribution of the dry matter within the tuber, negligible skin loss, a good length, and is bruise-proof. All these good characteristics mean that a variety is quickly picked out of the heap. It starts with the customer, the chips factory in this case, but is then passed on to the grower. The variety also has interesting characteristics that make the grower happy, such as its many resistances. And when you’ve got something new, an innovation, you mustn’t forget to communicate the fact. Hence the film.’ 20 Potato World 2013 • number 3 Pagina 19
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