Texas A&M Potato Breeding Trials Offer Reds to Russets, Babies to Bakers

 

 

When Kelly Kuball walked the Texas A&M Potato Breeding and Variety Development Program variety display trials near Springlake recently, he was a long way from his specialty potato company in Arvin, California.

 

Kuball said the Texas A&M potato breeding materials have the potential to provide new products for his Tasteful Selections clientele. As the company’s variety development coordinator, he is looking for potatoes with unique characteristics, such as shape, color, size – “anything that might improve what we already grow and put in our bag for our customers.”

 

Tasteful Selections concentrates mainly on baby potatoes, a rapidly growing market, he said. This is his fourth year to come observe the trials in Springlake, but he has been growing and evaluating Texas A&M potatoes for seven years in California and at other Tasteful Selections growing regions on the West Coast. They currently have three Texas experimental varieties in their advanced trials.

 

“If the varieties pass all the qualifications in early observation trials, we will get then graduate the lines into replicated and commercial tests,” Kuball said.

 

Kuball was among about 50 people who attended the annual Potato Field Day in cooperation with Springlake Potato Sales Inc. and the Bruce Barrett Farm.

 

Dr. Isabel Vales, Texas A&M AgriLife Research potato breeder in College Station, said the breeding program’s main goal is to develop new potato varieties. She now leads the breeding program, long run by Dr. Creighton Miller.

 

“We work in different market classes,” Vales said. “Clearly the fresh market russets are very important, followed by the chippers.”

 

The Texas A&M program is known for its release of several strains of the fresh-market Russet Norkotah strains, including No. 278, which she said is “a beautiful fresh market russet, long appreciated in the marketplace.” The Texas A&M Russet Norkotah strains currently have 35 licensees in 12 states. Another recent release, Reveille Russet, has been licensed to 16 seed growers, with comments that it is “a very good baking potato.”

 

 

“Vanguard Russet is our latest release,” Vales said. “It is a blocky, attractive potato that we have great hopes for. We also have another russet variety with pink eyes and yellow flesh, but we are still in the process of finding someone interested in promoting it.”

 

In terms of specialty potatoes, she said they are working with varieties that provide different sizes, colors of skin and flesh, as well as some with higher levels of antioxidants.

 

“We are working in the area of smaller potatoes, bite-sized potatoes, but that’s a relatively new market, and we need promoters or ambassadors who are interested in moving those potatoes to the public,” Vales said. “We also have some pretty advanced materials, not quite ready to be released, but very interesting from the perspective of different culinary preparations.”