MANILA, Philippines - Considered a high-value crop and major agricultural produce in the Cordilleras, annual demand for potato in the country is about 745,000 metric tons.
With the increasing number of fastfood chains in the country, meeting the country’s requirement for processing varieties is a great challenge for our potato stakeholders.
The Northern Philippines Root Crops Research and Training Center is undertaking a project that aims to mass produce, commercialize, and promote approved processing potato varieties of good quality.
The project is being funded by the Bureau of Agricultural Research under the Department of Agriculture’s High-Value Crops Development Program, through the Bureau’s National Technology Commercialization Program.
Quality clean planting materials, in the form of rooted cuttings or tuber seed pieces, are sourced from mother plants propagated through tissue culture.
Of great importance to agriculture is that potatoes harvested from tissue culture-derived planting materials can double or even triple the yield of those produced with the use of traditional planting materials and varieties.
The use of these planting materials will, in the long run, work to reduce the country’s importation of processing potatoes, said project leader Olnes Gonzales.
Among the available potato varieties, the NSIC-approved Igorota and Bengueta patatas are considered as the best by Cordillera farmers because these are well-adapted to their localities, are high yielding, resistant to late blight, and have favorable eating qualities.
Gonzales said from a single potato stem cutting or G0 tuber seed piece can produce more or less six to 18 tubers in 100-120 days after planting (the G0 seed potato, also called potato minitubers, is the first generation coming from potato microplants).
The 60 farmer beneficiaries of the project were first trained on how to manage potato clean planting materials before they were given stem cuttings as their initial source of planting materials.
They are potato growers in the municipalities of Atok, Madaymen, Buguias, and Mankayan in Benguet; and in Bauko and Besao in Mountain Province.
The project produced 7,000 tissue-cultured mother plants in which mass propagation was done in a greenhouse to produce 30,000 stem cuttings. These were then distributed to the farmer-beneficiaries.
Gonzales said the facility can also produce 180,000 tuberlets from which G1 clean planting materials can be produced (the G1 potato is harvested from the G0 minituber as the next generation).
