News on Potato Defects and Diseases from Europe

At the 2014 Fruit Logistica event, being held in Berlin from 5-7 February, DuPont Food Chain Manager for the EMEA region, Mr Luigi Coffano, highlighted the challenges faced by a world population that is growing by 150,000 people every day.

Avoid bruising at potato harvest by managing moisture levels pre-desiccation is the advice from Hutchinsons Root Crop Technical manager, Darryl Shailes.

The Guatemalan potato moth is wreaking havoc in potato crops in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. Control measures exist, but are toxic or financially out of reach. Now there's a promising alternative: a biopesticide based on a virus that infects the moth.

Insort and EVK have signed a worldwide license agreement with Key Technology for use of Chemical Imaging Technology in proven Key solutions provided to the potato industry.

The UK government has stepped up its efforts to control the potato disease ring rot.

An international team of scientists reveals that a unique strain of potato blight they call HERB-1 triggered the Irish potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century

This week , the potato variety Sarpo Mira was named Plant of the week in the British Newspaper "The Guardian"

With the threat posed to potato crops by nematodes, Polish growers are expected to welcome the announcement that Vydate®, a nematicide from DuPont that is already used to help maintain the quality and marketable yield of crops in the UK and the Netherlands.

The Austrian optical sorting equipment manufacturer Insort GmbH will highlight its Chemical Imaging Technology applied in their Sherlock Separator for the potato industry at the Interpom | Primeurs.

No sooner does the risk of importing exotic diseases such as dickeya in seed potatoes appear to be receding than another potential source of harm to the health of the UK crop has reared its head.

At the Public University of Navarra, David Gómez Castillo carried out research for his PhD on the possibility of substituting the current use of CIPC in potato storage by treating the tuber with essential oils of mint, caraway, coriander, eucalyptus an...

While recent rain should help boost protective soil intake by harvesters, the risk of potato bruising remains high, potato agronomists and machinery makers are warning.

Plant breeding business KWS marked its formal entry into potato breeding in the UK last week, with a demonstration of up-and-coming varieties and an outline of its key breeding objectives for the potato crop.

Researchers led by Professor Bruce Fitt, now at the University of Hertfordshire, have used modern DNA techniques on late nineteenth-century potatoes to show how the potato blight may have survived between cropping seasons after the Irish potato famine ...

Sustainable potato production across the EU could be under threat from potato cyst nematodes (PCN) and free living nematodes (FLN) without a comprehensive review of sampling and management options.

The increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere can have a positive influence on the potato yield. This is according to Anton Haverkort of Plant Research International, part of Wageningen UR, on 22 August during the bi-annual Potato Demo Day at Westmaas.

A group of campaigners in the Irish Republic has been refused a legal challenge over the first trial of a genetically modified potato crop. In July, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave the go ahead for a gm blight-resistant potato crop to be tested in County Carlow.

The Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute and CAFRE, Greenmount Campus have issued a further potato blight warning.