The humble, beloved potato
Canadian potato breeders work together to develop a potato that can thrive on organic farms and in remote Northern Ontario.
With a tagline of “Harvesting Diversity, Feeding Hope,” the humble potato is being celebrated around the world this month. As the UN General Assembly recently recognized, the hardy potato is positioned to combat hunger and provide food security: it’s “one of humanity’s most important and universally loved staple foods.” Potatoes are also a unique crop for sustainable farming in the future. Thus the UN designated this May 30th as the first International Day of Potato.
In Canada, potato breeders are testing three new varieties of potato in an effort to combat late blight, which devastated the organic potato sector last summer. Christian Courier interviewed Alliston, Ontario farmer Peter VanderZaag about his part in a new, three-year research project to breed disease resistant potatoes in northern Ontario.
“It’s a project we’re starting this year and it’s very exciting,” VanderZaag says. Dr Silvia Sarapura, an assistant professor at University of Guelph, is taking cultivars developed by VanderZaag and four other Canadian private potato breeders to four First Nations communities in Northern Ontario.
Sarapura intends to start seed banks for crops like corn, squash and potatoes that can survive the climate in the North.
“These are remote places, hundreds of miles by helicopter to get to these places,” observes VanderZaag, a member of Alliston Christian Reformed Church. Sarapura, who grew up in the Central Andes on a farm, has experienced firsthand how better food systems can transform the economy of a region. She’s passionate about helping Indigenous peoples around the world find food sovereignty. Sarapura’s team will collect data on soil samples and crops and select seeds for the future. Indigenous seed keepers, chefs and community members will be involved in the entire process. For seeds, Sarapura is partnering with Cultural Seeds, a southern Ontario Indigenous-owned company, and with the private potato breeders who developed three new rustic potato varieties.
“We think that these varieties, because of their strong resistances to diseases and viruses, would be ideal to grow in the north for food security,” says VanderZaag.
How the crosses were made
It started almost ten years ago when five members of the Canadian Private Potato Breeders Network (CPPBN) teamed up to attempt something new. They had a sample of Cooperation 88 (C88), a potato variety with excellent late blight resistance. The problem? C88 is a short-day variety of potato, developed for climates closer to the equator. Could the breeders cross C88 with two long-day, Canadian French fry varieties, and transfer the late blight and virus resistance into a variety suitable for Canadian summers?
In southern Ontario, late blight is a menace. “It’s hard to estimate the value of the losses plus the added cost of fungicide sprays but it would be in the millions of dollars,” says VanderZaag about last year’s harvest. He added that the organic potato sector was hit hardest: “they couldn’t stop the infection.”
Potatoes are the fifth-largest agricultural crop in Canada, after canola, wheat, soybean and corn.
Frozen French fries are a big export for Canada, especially from Alberta and Manitoba, to Japan, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines.
“You saw the pictures,” he reminds me. Sure enough, a field of Wider Sky Farms, an organic farm in Alliston, is brown and wilted. But there’s a thick patch of green plants in the middle, still thriving, where the new varieties are undergoing a field test.
In 2015 the breeders crossed the Canadian French fry potato varieties with C88. Seedlings spent three years in field trials, and after all seedlings with small tubers and “wild” foliage were discarded, three cultivars were chosen: PSPG 15-81-1, PSPG 15-90-1 and PSPG 15-80-9LB. These three varieties were tested again for four years in farms in Manitoba, Ontario and Prince Edward Island. Then they entered another three-year test on organic Wider Sky Farms in Alliston, where they showed off their late blight resistance.
It’s typical for a potato variety to take over 10 years from when it’s selected to when it goes mainstream, VanderZaag says, “because of the complicated genetics.”
Origin stories
In a way, it’s a story that comes full circle; Sarapura’s knowledge gleaned in the Central Andes, where potatoes originated, is carried to Northern Ontario alongside cultivars that get their disease resistance by way of C88’s wild Peruvian genes.
Dr. Chien Huy Dao, VanderZaag’s Vietnamese graduate student doing his Masters in the Philippines, made a cross utilizing wild species potato selections with known resistance to late blight from Peru. VanderZaag brought the seed to China, where a researcher selected the clone that would become Cooperation 88, so named because it was developed by people from China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Canada and Peru. C88 took off in China, and a Chinese farmer near Hamilton has started growing one of the PSPG varieties, to the enthusiasm of the Chinese market in Toronto who taste home in the tubers.
C88 is an anomaly in the potato world; no one claimed plant breeder’s rights on it, leaving it in the public domain for growers.
Plant breeders’ rights
When someone breeds a new potato variety, they are paid royalties for every bag of seed. It’s not a lot of money, VanderZaag says, but it motivates private breeders, who put in over a decade to test a variety and then, in Canada, pay to register it with the government. The breeders of the PSPG varieties are considering registering two of their successful cultivars: one for the organic chip market and one for Chinese markets.
It’s not as clear-cut a decision as it may seem. “These three are winners from the perspective of late blight resistance. Are they winners from the perspective of marketability, that’s another question. For two of them I’d say yes, but will they be large markets or small markets?”
In Canada, government money for potato breeding goes exclusively to the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC). Private breeders, organized into the CPPBN network, fund themselves.
Dutch companies also sell their Dutch varieties within Canada. Those are the three groups developing new seed, VanderZaag says. “Who is the most successful? I’d say for yellow-flesh eating potato, the Dutch companies are the most successful. All the other breeding, French fry and chips and table, I’d say the private breeders are the most successful.”
Recently, the AAFC came to the CPPBN to ask to work together. As the secretary treasurer of the CPPBN, VanderZaag was involved in those talks. “They realized that they can’t do it themselves and that we have many advantages but we don’t have the upstream resources to do our work, which they have. It’s a win-win if we will just cooperate.”
CPPBN and AAFC have come to an agreement that the person selecting the new variety gets breeders’ rights, while all the data collected by the private breeders is shared back to AAFC. On behalf of Sunrise Potato in Alliston, VanderZaag became the first private breeder to sign an agreement with AAFC to work towards a new chip variety, breaking ground for collaborations in the future.
What will potato farmers be doing on the upcoming Day of the Potato? VanderZaag says the World Potato Congress is working on celebrations. “Personally, I’ll eat potatoes in different ways that day and share that on Twitter!”
The future of potato breeding
At the upcoming World Potato Congress (WPC) in Adelaide, Australia in June, cisgenics and diploid breeding will be discussed. These two developments will revolutionize the future of the potato, says Peter VanderZaag, president of the WPC.
In the UN’s statement on the potato, they mention that wild varieties of potato have traits like “the ability to adapt to different production environments, resistance to pests and diseases, and different tuber characteristics.” Through cisgenics, traits from these wild potatoes can be implanted into farmed varieties, says VanderZaag: “Traditional breeding takes decades to bring in a trait, but cisgenics takes a piece of DNA from species A to put into species B.” In certain countries (like Uganda) cisgenics has been met with government resistance. Cisgenics is currently being tested in Kenya, Nigeria, Indonesia and Bangladesh. “That work is going to revolutionize how we develop better resilient varieties quicker,” says VanderZaag, “that can withstand whatever kind of stress there may be: late blight, heat, drought. We think this is another major step in a way to feed the world in the years ahead.”
Diploid breeding is being tested in China, Holland and Peru. Right now, varieties like the PSPG cultivars are tetraploid crosses. Diploid breeding would restrict the genetic traits from sixteen to four possibilities, “then by inbreeding your diploid parents so they become homozygous, you can totally predict what the offspring will look like.” That’s not the only change diploid breeding will allow: “We’ll be using botanical seed, not tuber seed. We’ll sow the seeds directly to the field – you won’t plant food anymore.”
