In pursuit of the perfect potato
David Lewis
Tribune reporter
OSORNO, Chile -- Local potato growers Dick and Marlys Bedlington recently returned from the nation of Chile, as part of a group expedition to share knowledge about spuds throughout the international agricultural community.
The couple traveled to Osorno and Puerto Montt, Chile, in a joint learning-teaching venture with plant pathologists from North Dakota State University and the hosts in the Chilean Department of Agriculture.
The trip was sort of like a pilgrimage to potato growers’ Mecca, since Chile is the birthplace of the potato. Also, with country’s approximately 60,000 independent potato farmers, the sheer size of the industry there adds to the interest for a potato farmer.
But Dick and Marlys Bedlington made the trip with a clear objective. “The goal of the trip was to find new varieties of potatoes better suited to our customers' needs,” said Dick Bedlington.
Specialty varieties of potato plants are extremely hard to come by in the domestic potato market, but are available internationally if they can be brought into the country. Getting any sort of agricultural product into the United States is a dubious process, however, due to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plant protection and quarantine policies. Still, through the Bedlingtons’ partnership with NDSU, they are assisting in the development of unique, specialty “clone” varieties for American production.
In Chile, the Bedlingtons visited a number of laboratories of plant breeders as well as the single potato seed farm that is responsible for supplying all of Chile’s potato seed. They toured the grounds of this enormous farm and from the roughly 2,300 varieties of potato grown on-site they viewed as many as time allowed and selected between 10 and 12 varieties for re-evaluation and/or cross breeding. Next March, they will return to check on their plants’ results.
“We were looking for a plant that produced a high yield of potatoes that are small in size,” said Dick Bedlington.
The varieties they were looking for are a potato with red skin and white flesh, a potato with red skin and yellow flesh, and one with white skin and white flesh. The ideal potato has small eyes (the surface indentations in a potato’s skin) and high resistance to disease, it performs well under drought or near-drought conditions for their consumers in California who deal with a limited water supply, and it develops earlier, producing full-grown potatoes in less than 90 days.
They found Osorno, Chile, to have strikingly similar conditions, climatically and topographically, to Whatcom County. The two locations are nearly equidistant from the equator. Additionally, Osorno lies on the coastal plain separating the Andes mountains from the Pacific Ocean, almost exactly like Whatcom County with the Cascades.
“We thought that if that mountain had a little more snow on it, then it would look just like Mt. Baker,” said Marlys Bedlington.
The similarities proved especially helpful for comparing the performance of the potato plants in their native soil to how they would perform in a Whatcom setting.
One difference to be accounted for was the extremely high organic matter content of Chilean soil, roughly 20 percent. “They had no need for fertilizer, and in the fields that they irrigated they had big crops, really big crops,” said Dick Bedlington.
While locally every field is irrigated, in Chile access to water is controlled by the power companies that own the rights to the water in the rivers, making well digging necessary for almost all instances of local irrigation.
Chilean potato production benefits from the nation’s surfeit of cheap labor. “You actually saw people following around a mechanical excavator and picking up potatoes by hand,” said Dick Bedlington.
The Bedlingtons’ hope their venture can help find solutions to supply and demand inequities by bringing previously isolated markets into the global agricultural economy. The potatoes that are in high demand in Chile are red skinned and yellow fleshed, leaving the growers and breeders to frequently throw out promising new clones of other varieties. Now, with the opportunity to sell some of these varieties to the Bedlingtons for the very different needs of American commercial growers, the waste can be reduced.
The team of plant pathologists from NDSU also helped to take some unwanted varieties of potatoes off the Chilean seed farmers’ hands. While Bedlington Farms serves primarily the west coast of the United States and produces the potatoes you might find in your local supermarket, North Dakota would primarily be used for potato chips.
Apparently, there is not an adequate supply of seed for the Chilean commercial potato growers. In fact, the Bedlingtons were invited to start another seed farm in the country, but they have no plans to do so.
Dick Bedlington Farms specializes in the growing and shipping of seed potatoes, essentially providing commercial growers with the quality seeds needed to produce excellent potato crops that make their way into chips, French fries, and supermarkets for consumption.
Marlys Bedlington dedicates her time to Pure Potato, a sister company that breeds the potato plants that then are produced in large numbers by DBF or other seed farmers. What is done at Pure Potato is essentially scientific experimentation involving the cross-pollination of different varieties of potato plants that produce “clone” varieties better suited to the growing environments and demands of consumers.
Pure Potato deals with potato plants in their infancy. “What I work with are tissue cultures that are found in Petri dishes,” said Marlys Bedlington.
From these tissue cultures, families of nine potato plants are produced for study, all coming from common parenting. If one of these plants or entire families shows promise, it will take at least three years before it can be produced in significant numbers by seed farmers, at least four years before it is available for commercial growing, and at least five years before it reaches the hands of the consumer.
E-mail David Lewis at lyndentrib@lyndentribune.com.
