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40 POTATO GROWER | JANUARY 2017 40 POTATO GROWER | JANUARY 2017 W hen Hendrik Bakker immigrated with his family to Alberta from the Netherlands in 1988, he immediately set to work doing what he had always done: growing seed potatoes. There were differences, to be sure, between farming in the Netherlands and farming in Canada, but the Bakker family is nothing if not resourceful. If they could grow potatoes in their old home, they could certainly succeed at it in their new home. It wasn't long before they were operating a successful farm a few miles west of Edmonton and shipping potato seed all over North America. Yet Hendrik kept thinking about those differences. Alberta had been good to the family, and the farm was thriving, but he felt he could bring more to the table. The most obvious contrast was in the respective types of potatoes grown and marketed on either side of the Atlantic. In Europe, his customers had always wanted elongated, yellow-fleshed potatoes. Canadian and American growers and consumers largely looked for uniform, rounder, red- and russet-skinned varieties with white flesh. Most of his customers had never heard of the potato cultivars he had grown up growing and eating. But as Hendrik grew to understand more and more about North American potato growers and consumers, he came to believe that those varieties from his youth could translate on this side of the pond. Using his connections in Europe, he gradually began integrating European varieties into his Canadian seed farm. "It really started more as a hobby," explains Hendrik's son, Phil. "Through having successful seed farm and having our contacts in Europe, we were able to bring over unique varieties from Europe my father had experience with. That was fairly foreign at the time in North America, where most of the varieties were being bred by universities. It was not a common concept to be bringing European varieties in." Common or not, it caught on. In 1996, the Bakkers founded Solanum International, a company dedicated to introducing 40 POTATO GROWER | JANUARY 2017 High-generation Solanum seed potatoes are harvested at Creekside Farms in northern Alberta. A structural planter plants a Solanum International variety of whole-tuber seed potatoes at West Edmonton Seed Potatoes in northern Alberta.