Magnifico! “Developing New Varieties” By Gavin Towers
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grico is a potato breeding company based in Emmeloord in Holland. The co-operative was formed nearly fifty years ago by Dutch farmers to develop new potato varieties. The potato breeding work is carried out at Agrico Research. Potato breeding is a long-term process. The breeders choose the parents best suited to the market sector and then select the most likely offspring from the resulting seedlings. This selection process continues over at least nine years until only two or three seedlings remain from the initial 225,000 seedlings produced every year. The promising seedlings then enter the trialing stages where they are grown in many countries to learn how they perform in different climates and soils this can take another four or five years. This information is used to select the seedlings for National Listing at which point the seedling is given a name and becomes a new variety. The new variety then enters the variety development programme. At this point there is only a limited quantity of seed
Chippy Chat & Fast Food Magazine • January 2022
available, and it is placed with growers and customers supplying the market for that variety. One example of this is Babylon the new chipping variety from Agrico. Babylon was bred in 2006 and was added to the National List in 2016. More recently the variety has been grown by farmers in the Ely, Cambridgeshire area to supply fish and chip shops through local potato merchant Isle of Ely Produce Ltd. As the seed tonnage of Babylon increases year on year more fields are planted. Agrico works closely with the growers to guide them on best growing practices such as seed rates and spacing, fertilizer application and harvest. Storage and dormancy knowledge is gathered from larger quantities over the winter season. All of this builds up to help the supply chain from field to fork to learn how to get the best from Babylon. Agrico has been working very closely with Chippy Chat magazine to promote Babylon in the monthly magazine and at the Isle of Ely Ltd Open Day in September. At the Open Day the mobile chip van “Pimp my Fish” was frying Babylon at lunch time and the chip shop friers all commented that the Babylon chips had good texture and delicious taste, and this was from the best friers in the business! Agrico is increasing the area of Babylon Chippy Chat & Fast Food Magazine • January 2022
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