A colleague and I were talking recently, and she mentioned how much hope and faith goes into potato farming. Faith can have different definitions, and in this case, she didn’t mean religious faith. She meant having deep trust. It’s true. Faith is essential in everything farmers do. Faith in Mother Nature, faith in your team, faith in your production capabilities, faith in your land, faith in your marketer, and faith in your buyer all need to come together for a successful season. And for us at HZPC, we want to ensure you have faith that our varieties’ performance will help your farm operation be successful.
Faith is bigger than ever for us, as we’re transitioning away from direct sales of our seed. We have faith in our seed dealers to work with our customers and maintain a high level of service. This enables us to focus on providing our growers with agronomic advice, helping with market access, and ensuring we guide our breeding program to meet end market needs now and into the future.
Breeding is absolutely a game of faith. We produce 800,000 true potato seeds (TPS) every single year in our breeding program. We used to take them all out and plant them in the field to see if they performed well. It takes a lot of faith that there is a better variety out there to put in that effort. Now we’re bolstering our faith with advanced science. We’ve added genetic marker assisted selection on all 800,000 true potato seeds. We can verify the presence of desired traits before we take them to the field.
We don’t identify desired traits in a vacuum. We identify those traits with our partners, our growers and our marketers. We combine market and agronomic vision to understand what challenges we might face in the future. We have faith that we’re all in this together.
Ultimately, it all comes down to one more important level of faith: our consumers’ level of faith in the excellent end-product. Our consumer and foodservice outreach program, Potato Glory, and our new Pick the Perfect PotatoTM app, demystify potato selection for any application.
We understand the faith required to take on a new crop year. We are incredibly honored that you place your faith in us, our varieties, and our network of seed dealers. We are committed to always being worthy of that faith.
