News on New Potato Varieties from United Kingdom

Potatoes in Practice, the UK’s biggest field potato event, is on 7 August at Balruddery Farm. Hosted by James Hutton Institute, it brings growers, researchers, and industry leaders together to share innovations and advance the potato sector.

Greenvale’s Golden Kings launched ‘Move Over Maris’ with Great British Chefs to promote climate-friendly, high-yielding potatoes needing less irrigation and pest control, urging consumers to switch varieties.

A new predictive method has shown a way to better select parents for new potato varieties, offering a blueprint for better potatoes and a way to speed up the production of higher yield varieties.

Launched in 2017, the potato variety Kingsman has developed quickly in popularity to become Scotland-based potato breeder Cygnet PB Ltd.’s first globally successful variety.

Seed breeders work closely with potato growers to develop desirable agronomic traits, and with the wider supply chain for those crucial characteristics such as dry matter distribution, sugar formation, and storability.

Recent research at the James Hutton Institute suggests that limited genetic differences in potato lineages has left British and American spuds vulnerable to late blight, the disease that caused the Irish potato famine.

Ayrshire potatoes have been granted special status under EU rules to protect them from imitation.

Scientists at The James Hutton Institute say discovery could help breed new colourful and improved potato varieties

Research at the James Hutton Institute has identified genetic variations which can help protect potato crop yields at high temperature, potentially providing potato breeders with a valuable tool in their quest to create varieties resilient to heat stress

In Great Britain, Maris Piper is still by a wide margin the most grown potato variety. But potato growers have planted an increased area of emerging varieties to serve the fresh packing market

The Chinese Government and leading potato company, Xisen Potato Group have committed £3 million to a collaboration with James Hutton Limited (JHL) to breed new varieties and research resistance to pests and diseases, tuber storage and potato processing.

Scientists have identified a version of a single gene involved in the heat stress response that is more active in potato types that can tolerate high temperature, potentially providing potato breeders a tool to make potato varieties less vulnerable to increased temperature.

AHDB Potatoes has produced provisional estimates of planted areas by variety for Great Britain for 2016.

Purple Magic, a Northern Ireland potato with high anthocyanin content, was bred by Paul Watts at the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute and just reached the finals of INVENT 2016, a Northern Ireland innovation competition.

Following the successful first-time collaboration by the British potato and horticulture sector at Fruit Logistica 2013, Potato Council, Horticultural Development Company (HDC) and the Commercial Horticultural Association (CHA) return with their industries to this massive event in February 2014.

The Irish Lumper potato has been cultivated once more by County Antrim farmer Michael McKillop who has a keen interest in history.

The days of a few big varieties dominating the potato market are over, with breeding programmes becoming more focused on delivering sustainable varieties for specific markets.

Growers could start seeing the benefits of the potato genome being sequenced within the next decade, with varieties bringing new traits such as PCN resistance or improved tuber shape.