Potato companies sign potato breeding deal with Mylnefield Research Service

Two Potato companies - Taylor Food Group and QV Foods - have signed a five year deal with the James Hutton Institute's Mylnefield Research Service (MRS) subsidiary to continue a potato breeding programme that originally started in 2005.

Taylor Food Group, which owns Taypack, QV Foods and its subsidiary Pseedco are all based at Moncur, Perthshire. The deal with MRS is worth a considerable six figure sum.

Breeder Finlay Dale, who leads the Hutton's potato team, will use the latest technological advances, including the recent mapping of the potato genome to develop new varieties from salad potatoes to baking potatoes.

The previous breeding programme has left a legacy of hundreds of crosses which will be available for further use, but attention has recently focused on an unnamed selection which is very near to commercialisation and is grown on a field scale.

The variety has been multiplied by the Brown family at West Adamston, near Dundee and is showing good tuber blight and blackleg resistance. It also shows partial resistance to pallida, a type of potato cyst nematode. There is also good immunity to virus Y and powdery scab.

As Mr Alistair Redpath pointed out, the involvement of Pseedco and QV Foods would mean a much wider spectrum of uses for these new varieties.