Magnifico! Developing New Varieties of potato

Magnifico!

“Developing New Varieties”

By Gavin Towers

Agrico 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 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

seed produced in the UK to meet the market demands for this quality chipping variety. It has taken fifteen years from the first crossing to get the chip product on the plate and it has proven to be well worth the wait.

Austen Dack Chippy Chat Publishing Editor said. “Isle of Ely Produce have invested lots of time over the years (including publishing Chippy Chat) with Agrico into helping to develop various chipping potatoes for the fish & chip market. Their unique relationship between farmer and chip shop owner via their field to frier platform has helped to produce potatoes which not only tick vital boxes for the grower, but also for the chippy and ultimately the consumer.”

Alex Moore Agrico UK Sales Manager said: ”Chippy Chat and Isle of Ely Produce have been trialing Babylon for a year now with key shops across the UK. We are very impressed with the results thus far, and this activity provides a benchmark for the future too. They have set up a group of fantastic Chip Shop Ambassadors who we hope to utilize more in the future”.

Oliver Boutwood Isle of Ely Produce Director said: “We are very happy with our partnership with Agrico. With a network of hundreds of growers and thousands of fish and chip shop owners, we will look to develop this further. This activity was part of the reason we won a National Potato Industry Award recently.”

If you would like to trial Babylon and become a Chip Shop Ambassador, please email austen@chippychat.co.uk