TRADE AND MARKET I NG Italy: ideal testing ground for Dutch potato breeding With impressions of the Italian ‘trials and tribulations’, the complete Dutch group of breeders, here at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, can get to work. Their notebooks are full, time to work them out and to search in their own trial fields and/or greenhouses for the desired improvements. partly the result of very close crop rotation – or none at all. The grower of the practice field is not yet affected by the fungus, because he tries to bring in intercropping as much as possible. He was also lucky with the weather at the start. He could already plant his Constance on 20 January with 35/45 sized cut seed. Many growers have used cut seed this season, because they couldn’t afFord uncut seed. After the favourable planting period, however, Antonio was faced with a period of snow, frost and 40 consecutive days of cold and rain. For the usually-necessary, extra moisture supply, he has drip irrigation located in the ridges. He also uses this for fertilisation purposes. Additional rain water was hardly needed during the growing season, but fertilisation was. Despite the weather extremes, the yield seems to be good. The crop is still green and can easily grow extra tons of potatoes. However, at the end of May, the grower plans to destroy the foliage the following week and to harvest within two weeks. The harvest is then estimated to be 35 tons and he expects to be able to get a reasonable price of around 30 euros per 100 kilograms. That’s a lot less than the year before, but the price is expected to fall sharply after mid-June, because all the overdue early potatoes will then come on the market in one go. A visit to a few fields further down the road clearly shows that most potatoes in the region are still a long way from reaching the required size. Francesco Provvisiero would have liked to have a few samples of the varieties inspected, but the tubers are still far too small. A field with Colomba has only just started tuber initiation, it was only planted at the beginning of April. The coarse soil structure shows that the conditions during planting were far from optimal. A field with Danique, an Agrico variety, also still has a long way to go. Rhizoctonia is a problem here. Grower Marco Trezza is considering carrying out treatment at every possible opportunity: during storage, during planting and during growth. There’s also another solution and that’s a new volcano eruption, he says jokingly. It’s already 1000 years ago that the last lava flowed from the crater and that could provide new healthy soil. But then again, it would take a few centuries before potatoes could be grown there and that’s of no use to today’s growers. With these impressions of the Italian ‘trials and tribulations’, the group of breeders can get to work. Their notebooks are full, time to work them out and to search in their own Dutch trial fields and/or greenhouses for the desired improvements. ● Leo Hanse Potato World 2018 • number 3 35 Pagina 38
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