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resistance,” says Novy. “We then have a duplicate planting of those same breeding clones at Aberdeen, where—based on his late-blight readings—we concurrently select resistant clones and advance them in our program,” based on their agronomic performance under irrigated production in the western United States. The late blight-resistant cultivar Defender is an example of a recent release (2006) from the program. Defender has helped growers save on fungicides and other expenses associated with controlling late blight, which attacks the crop’s leaves and tubers, rendering the latter unmarketable. Over the next few years, Defender may be joined by one more blight-resistant variety, depending on how it performs in ongoing trials in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California and Texas. Typically, potatoes evaluated by Novy and Whitworth—and released in collaboration with university colleagues and the grower-supported Potato Variety Management Institute—are selected for their likelihood of success in the western United States. But requests for such releases also originate from other regions of the country and from outside the United States, where some of the same problems occur. SAVING STORED POTATOES Potato diseases are costly, but so are post-harvest losses, which range from 10 to 30 percent of the harvested crop. Post-harvest losses result mainly from early sprouting and infections caused by wounds suffered during harvest. Some potato varieties also lose nutritional and processing quality faster than others during extended storage. “Most potatoes come from family farms that cannot afford to take such losses,” says Jeff Suttle, research leader in the ARS Sugarbeet and Potato Research Unit at Fargo, N.D, and its work site at East Grand Forks. Marty Glynn, Suttle’s colleague at East Grand Forks, works closely with the Northern Plains Potato Growers Association and public potato breeding programs across the United States to evaluate the storage properties of promising new varieties. The evaluations are made using a 1/20-scale processing line that exactly mimics those used by large-scale commercial processors of potato chips and french fries. This collaboration has recently given rise to two named cultivars—Dakota Crisp and Dakota Diamond, which fare well even www.potatogrower.com 23