Blogposts

January 11, 2021 | Blogs

Fungus diseases: Rhizoctonia canker (black scurf) in potatoes

Rhizoctonia solani (Thanatephorus cucumeris) is a commonly in soil occurring fungus, which causes damage to many crops. It causes a range of symptoms in potatoes. Most damage in seed potato crops is caused by the presence of sclerotia on the tubers. This symptom is known as black scurf.

January 07, 2021 | Blogs

Resistance breeding and potato breeding pioneers

Choices of different potato varieties were limited in the 18th century. However, the spread of potato leaf roll and late blight diseases accelerated breeding work because they could not be controlled by crop management or pesticides and fungicides. In search of a solution, research work turned to the development of resistant varieties.

December 28, 2020 | Blogs

Fungus diseases: Silver scurf in potatoes

Silver scurf is caused by the fungus Helminthosporium solani. It is a very common potato disease which only develops on tubers. In the field early varieties usually become more severely affected than late maturing ones.

December 07, 2020 | Blogs

Transport of potatoes

Until the third quarter of the last century, potato was a local for local foodstuff. It was produced and consumed or processed within one or a few hundred kilometers.Since then the potato has gradually partly become a global commodity.

November 30, 2020 | Blogs

Washing, weighing, packing and palletizing potatoes

Washing of tubers to remove adhering dust, soil and clay caps usually takes place in the processing factory prior to peeling. Moreover, packers generally wash the tubers and subsequently dry them before they are packed in supermarket ready wrapping.

November 23, 2020 | Blogs

Mechanical potato graders

Tuber grading takes place when the tubers enter the store or when they leave the store. Processing companies for chips production take in the whole crop and grade it at their facilities. They produce various end-products for which there are specifications of the raw material. Crisps makers only make crisps (and flakes of the unusable…

November 16, 2020 | Blogs

Visually estimating potato size grades

Potatoes are graded according to sizes as required by the users. Smaller seed sizes fetch higher prices than large one per kg because per kilogram they yield more stems in the field when planted. Larger ware potatoes fetch a higher price than small ones because they yield more kg of chips and crisps per ton…

November 09, 2020 | Blogs

Sorting potatoes

Potato sorting involves the removal of unwanted rotten or odd-shaped tubers, clods, stones and other foreign bodies such as crop remains or pieces of wood. In subsistence and semi-mechanized systems, sorting is done while hand-picking the wanted hand-dug or windrowed tubers from the ground and leaving unwanted ones behind.

October 29, 2020 | Blogs

‘Keeping gene-editing outside Europe is a false security’

‘If you see what we’ve achieved in 150 years of potato cultivation, it’s in stark contrast, for example, to the breeding of sugar beet and maize. By making very specific adjustments in the DNA with certain techniques such as CRISPR-Cas, you can make rapid and significant progress, especially in the current clonal potato varieties’, says…

October 19, 2020 | Blogs

Potato storage temperature regime

Where there is only one growing season per year such as in temperate climates, the seed potato crop with an about four-month growing season is stored for eight months. This happens in the North of America, Europe and Asia and in the South of Africa, South America, Tasmania and New Zealand. In the subtropics with…