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. 1 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?