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Seed potatoes out of thin air

 Michele Konschuh and her team were able to produce four crops of seed potatoes, each one more successful than the last. Photo by Michele Konschuh/Crop Diversification Centre.

Mystery surrounds animals, people or things that appear out of thin air and movies scare us with a villain appearing out of the mist. But there are some very positive and non-threatening aspects to using thin air and mist in potato production. With the support of Alberta potato growers, Michele Konschuh may have fine-tuned a better, more efficient, financially viable means to produce seed potatoes.

Konschuh, a potato research scientist with the Crop Diversification Centre in Brooks, Alta., has used aeroponic technology to produce seed potatoes in a chamber that only requires the roots of the plants to be misted regularly. The PIP 200 Potato Incubator was shipped to Canada from NorthBright Technologies in Chicago. The company had previously developed a prototype called the PIP 100, but having heard about the system, seed growers in Alberta were keen to try the technology. The PIP 200’s arrival posed some challenges.

“We had to put the equipment together when it arrived,” Konschuh says, because there were no precise instructions for something that was still in development. Then, she and her team had to figure out how the equipment worked. “The first crop was humbling and we planted it in winter, which was not the best scenario, because we struggled to get the roots developed.”

The aeroponic system includes three chambers stacked on top of each other. The top chamber is open to the greenhouse and the tops of the plants grow upward into carbon dioxide and sunlight. The middle chamber hosts a plug that holds the tissue cultured plantlet. On the bottom is a fabric layer the roots push through into a dark, open area that is misted to feed the plants and keep them alive. The learning curve was not smooth, but jagged, as the team had to learn how to set up the chambers. The fabric the roots needed to push through was inadvertently substituted for something too heavy. Preventive maintenance procedures were learned through trial and error. Watering issues also became a challenge because, like any field situation, too much or too little stresses plants, causing yield and quality issues.

“We don’t know much about growing potatoes ‘in captivity,’” Konschuh says. But, faced with a tight schedule, she and her team were able to produce four crops of seed potatoes and each one was more successful than the one before.

“The potato growers did not expect this to be a long-term project, it was merely designed to assess a potential commercial unit,” Konschuh says. “We learned more each time we grew a crop, but we didn’t solve fertility issues and we need to understand root systems better.”

The provincial government recently purchased the PIP 200 and, on recommendations by Konschuh, the manufacturer is making adjustments to create the PIP 150 that will be more “user friendly.” She says the assessment did remove some of the risk that commercial seed potato growers would face if they decide to use the equipment themselves. In the four crop trials, she learned the system does work and that it can be economically viable.

After the first couple “less than stellar” crops using the equipment, the researchers learned and improved, hitting a high of 15 to 20 marketable seed tubers per plant. But, Konschuh admits, in the last trial only one variety was grown. In the first round, 14 varieties were grown and, she explains, each variety had its own idiosyncrasies, making it difficult to manage the fertility and water requirements to ensure each crop was managed successfully.

“We increased yield 10 times over what can be done in a greenhouse using traditional production methods,” Konschuh says. “We used less nutrition and water to produce the seed as well. The cost of producing seed potatoes was reduced based on lowering our variable cost per tuber. I think, realistically, a seed grower using this system could pay it off in about five years.”

The cost of production, according to the researcher, was 35 cents per tuber compared to the usual 75 cents accrued by the average grower. The team was able to grow some of their production in a field with no apparent differences when compared with traditionally grown seed. However, Konschuh suggests, the cost of seed will most likely not be lowered, but the availability of seed would ensure the province’s seed potato supply.

While the future of seed production in an aeroponic system appears very positive, there is still much to learn and Konschuh admits that it is a less forgiving system than hydroponics. “With aeroponics, you only have about three hours to save the crop if your water pump quits,” she says. “You also need good light and we need to understand fertility and manage plant density better.”

Even though Konschuh no longer works directly with the PIP 200, she sees many possibilities to use it as a research tool to study how tubers develop in the field, to understand how root systems feed plants, and to learn how to better control diseases.

Finally, the assessment of the PIP 200 is offering seed growers a new option and, with proof the system is viable and cost-effective, the future of seed production in Alberta could be changed. Konschuh believes what she was able to accomplish in only four crops is giving growers enough information to make informed choices about whether to take the leap and purchase the equipment. In the near future, producers may be growing tubers out of thin air in a misty environment and that’s not the least bit scary.

June 2, 2015  By Rosalie I. Tennison