February is my favourite month of the year because it’s Potato Lovers Month, which has made me think about what exactly I love about potatoes and the potato industry. I love how challenging potatoes are.
I love the fact that no two seasons are the same, no two growing areas are the same. There’s always a problem to solve, challenge to overcome, something to figure out. I’ve never been around anything in my life where you can do everything perfectly and still have 18 variables you couldn’t possibly have thought of, or control to influence the outcome. I love how rewarding being part of this industry is but it’s not for the faint of heart.
There are so many challenges that growers face that we don’t face as breeders. Growers must face all those personnel, equipment, and financing challenges that exceed our own in terms of scale and pace. While these are grower centric ‘problems’, as breeders we must be cognizant of these struggles and understand that growers’ labour challenges and ability to get capital are going to get more difficult and there is going to be continued pressure on farm financials. As breeders we need to be able to figure out how to help growers address these challenges and remain successful.
We spend a lot of time talking with our customers about various challenges. It could be a farm, storage, packing, processing, or market specific challenge. As breeders we must consider these challenges and what they’re going to look like in 15 years because that’s our breeding timeline. It’s difficult, but it’s the first step for us to develop varieties that will address future challenges.
To be able to use this information at HZPC we have built a complex and focused infrastructure. We invest more than any other potato breeder in the world into our research and development. That’s allowed us to make fundamental shifts in how we’re delivering product. One of those is with our genetic marker assisted selection. We’re testing all 800,000 of our true potato seeds annually to figure out whether they have the needed key resistances for our growers. We realize the market needs to not only know genetic disease resistances, but also how these varieties are going to perform, water utilization, dormancy, which are all traits we’re able to look at in the first stage of selection without ever being in a field. This allows us to be more efficient, targeted, and faster in how we respond to the agronomic and market challenges our growers face. I love working for an organization that uses innovation and technology to help our grower partners succeed and watching our customers leverage that into their own successes.
