A fascinating article on the Voice of America website tells us that Kenyan scientists, with colleagues at the International Potato Center (CIP), have developed a technique for growing potatoes plants in air (with water and nutrients) and then distributing the resulting plants to farmers, who report yield increases of 4 to 5 times. ((Yes, I know we’ve been here before, but those are the only figures I have to go on.)) The article dates back to June 2010, but CIP just shared it with its Facebook friends, and that gives me the chance to say I don’t fully understand:
Seeds are germinated in the laboratory. The seedlings are then fixed into holes cut out of Styrofoam sheets. And then after the seeds are developed further, they are harvested and distributed to farmers.
Talk about “seeds” and “germination” makes me think they’re talking about true potato seed, which has been the next big thing in potatoes for as long as I can remember. But if that were true, I would have expected the article to make more of it. And what will it do for potato diversity in Kenya? I have no idea what the market-leading cultivars are or the extent of concentration; how many varieties will the researchers make available?
The video shows that they are using in-vitro (virus cleaned) material to get started. So for potato we now have seed (tubers), true seed (seed) and, thanks to the VoA, seed (in-vitro plantlets).
Creating formal systems to provide clean seed is another next big thing for potatoes in central Africa.
Robert, your eyes are sharper than mine. I couldn’t tell whether they were in-vitro plantlets or young seedlings being placed into an in-vitro growing medium.
If formal systems to provide clean planting material for potato is the goal, I wonder why we haven’t heard more about minitubers or microtubers. A quick search suggests that this is actually quite a mature technology, ripe for transfer to countries that could make good use of it. My gut feeling is that minitubers would remove the problem of internal viruses, greatly cut production and distribution costs and be a little more robust as a system than hardened off in-vitro plants.
> I couldn’t tell whether they were in-vitro plantlets or young
> seedlings being placed into an in-vitro growing medium.
There is nothing in the video that looks like a seed, it is just my interpretation. It would be somewhat odd and unexpected to use true seeds in this context. A selling point of true seed is that it does not carry all these viruses such that you would not need this type of complex tuber seed delivery system.
Here is a video of Nicaraguan potato farmers discussing “sexual seeds” of the potato. With interventions by Noel Pallais (man wearing Panama hat), one of the great apostles of this technology.
Aeroponic is the only solution for developing countries to achieve food sustainability.Will be useful than traditional method of farming.Peterson(Bsc.Biotechnology,Msc )