Potato Grower

28 POTATO GROWER | SEPTEMBER 2018 Diggin' In Diggin' In VARIETY DEVELOPMENT | Story and photos by Kay Ledbetter, Texas A&M AgriLife Texas A&M breeding trials offer reds to russets, babies to bakers Lots of Options 208.745.1105 POTATO STORAGE 1959BehlenBuildingSystems16h.indd 1 8/1/18 8:32 AM When Kelly Kuball walked the Texas A&M Potato Breeding and Variety Development Program variety display trials near Springlake, Texas, in mid-July, he was a long way from his specialty potato company in Arvin, Calif. Kuball said the Texas A&M potato breeding materials have the potential to provide new products for his Tasteful Selections clientele. As the company's variety development coordinator, he is looking for potatoes with unique characteristics, such as shape, color and size—"anything that might improve what we already grow and put in our bag for our customers." Tasteful Selections concentrates mainly on baby potatoes, a rapidly growing market, Kuball said. This is his fourth year to come observe the trials in Springlake, but he has been growing and evaluating Texas A&M potatoes for seven years in California and at other Tasteful Selections growing locations on the West Coast. The company currently has three Texas experimental varieties in its advanced trials. "If the varieties pass all the qualifications in early observation trials, we will then graduate the lines into replicated and commercial tests," Kuball said. Kuball was among about 50 people who attended the annual Potato Field Day in cooperation with Springlake Potato Sales Inc. and Bruce Barrett Farm. Isabel Vales, Texas A&M AgriLife Research potato breeder in College Station, said the breeding program's main goal is to develop new potato varieties. She now leads the breeding program, long run by Creighton Miller. "We work in different market classes," Vales said. "Clearly, the fresh market russets are very important, followed by the chippers." The Texas A&M program is known for its release of several strains of fresh market Russet Norkotah strains, including No. 278, which Vales said is "a beautiful fresh market russet, long appreciated in the marketplace." The Texas A&M Russet Norkotah strains currently have 35 licensees in 12 states. Another recent release, Reveille Russet, has been licensed to 16 seed growers, with comments that it is "a very good baking potato." "Vanguard Russet is our latest release," Vales said. "It is a blocky, attractive potato that we have great hopes for. We also have another russet variety with pink eyes and yellow flesh, but we are still in the process of finding someone interested in promoting it." In terms of specialty potatoes, she said they are working with varieties that provide different sizes, colors of skin and flesh, as well as some with higher levels of antioxidants. "We are working in the area of smaller potatoes, bite-sized potatoes, but that's a relatively new market, and we need promoters or ambassadors who are interested in moving those potatoes to the public," Vales said. "We also have some pretty advanced materials [that are] not quite ready to be released, but [are] very interesting from the perspective of different culinary preparations." She said there is one particular variety with a red flesh "that I think could be useful for vegetarians. It almost looks like red meat. It's kind of funny; we were calling it 'paparoni' after papas, which means potatoes [in Spanish]. We cut them like pepperoni to put on a pizza. We need people who are creative and think outside of the box to start giving value to parameters like nutritional content, taste and originality." The potato breeding program starts by making crosses between parental lines that may have a desired trait, but not the About 50 people attended the recent potato field day A&M Potato Breeding and Variety Development Program.

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