Tree potato seed marketing spreads

Press, 14 May 1982, Page 16

Tree potato seed marketing spreads

Christchurch's own potato “prophet”, Dr A. S. Bedi of Templeton Plant Breeders Ltd, will release his true potato seed for the home gardener this year and he expects the novelty of growing potatoes from seeds will generate a lot of interest. True potato seed (T.P.S.) will be marketed by an as yet undisclosed company which has an agreement with Dr Bedi. and in the meantime Templeton Plant Breeders is advertising in the magazine Potato Bulletin that it will send anyone who asks a o.sgm sample of seed free.

Dr Bedi resigned from a potato research position with the Crop Research Division of the D.S.I.R. some four years ago to set up a private company to develop and produce T.P.S.

He has now developed the world's first T.P.S. variety, Wanangy, and he is beginning to sell the seed on the home and commercial markets.

Dr Bedi remains as firmly convinced as ever about the long-term potential for potato seed. He says it will make available . the nutritional benefits of potatoes to a large part of the third world which cannot grow potatoes at present as well as introducing cost benefits in all developed potato producing countries. "We owe the poorer peoples of the world more than aid,” he said last week.

"I was once underprivileged myself and I want to do something in iny own way to help those who are underprivileged now.” Dr Bedi said that planting potatoes the normal way, by planting seed potatoes or tubers, produced a multilication by weight of six to eight times what was planted. Only 7.5 gms of true potato seed would be necessary to plant the same area as one

tonne of normal seed potato tubers. For New Zealand to send seed potatoes to an underdeveloped country as part of an aid programme would be prohibitively expensive, but transporting true potato seed presents no problem. It is also very stable once prepared and dried properly and will keep for many years.

Growing potatoes from seed breaks the cycle of most of the common diseases of the crop, which are transported from crop to crop through the seed tubers. Quite a number of the potato varieties now grown in temperate climates do not go to a seeding stage, or sexual reproduction. It has been lost during genetic development. But some potato varieties do go to seed and produce small berries, like immature tomatoes. Each berry can contain 300 to 500 seeds.

Templeton Plant Breeders has been breeding and harvesting these berries for the last four years and extracting and drying many different lines of seed. It has built stocks of four different types of the Waitangy line and has sold some of this seed overseas already to the United States. Dr Bedi has high hopes for further exports to that country and to European countries.

Dr Bedi concedes that growing potatoes from T.P.S. is completely different agronomically than growing them from tubers and for this reason T.P.S. might be slow to catch on with commercial growers.

Some 8000 ha of potatoes are planted commercially in New Zealand each year.

Dr Bedi estimates another 2()00ha are planted by home gardeners.

The T.P.S. should be planted in flats or seed boxes from August to October and pricked out when they germinate. When they are around lOcms high they can be transplanted into the garden, usually about early October.

Dr Bedi says the transplanted seedlings do not • grow very fast for the first month or so and that over all they take somewhat longer to reach maturity and set tubers than plants grown from tubers.

They can be dug from about Easter onwards but will stay in a free-draining Soil right through winter and keep quite fresh.

Dr Bedi is taking a longterm view of his T.P.S. development, particularly as regards profits.

He said he left a secure job at the D.S.I.R. for an insecure future and he gives credit to his wife, the Rural Bank and the Development

Finance Corporation for financial help during the development period. But he is now employing up to three people at. different times of the year and he believes he is the world leader in T.P.S. research. He is convinced of the cost effectiveness of T.P.S., particularly for the Third World. Genetic development, for breeding of potato varieties which will set tubers in warm ground conditions will

be accelerated by‘T.P.S. and for that reason Dr Bedi has obtained access through the D.S.I.R. to world-wide potato varieties for his research. Dr Bedi’s work in the cold soil of Templeton may be-a long way from India with its under-fed millions but he knows for a fact that it is going to be a lot cheaper to bridge the gap with an envelop of seeds than a tonne of seed potatoes.