Agronomy of True Potato Seed-based cultivation pathways

The innovation of hybrid potato breeding comes with opportunities to re-design potato multiplication and cultivation systems. The conventional system has significant challenges regarding clonal multiplication of starting materials; a slow process due to low multiplication rates combined with a rapid pest and disease built-up, often soil-borne. Moreover, seed tuber infrastructure is cumbersome and costly due to seed tuber’s bulky and perishable nature. In contrast, hybrid potato breeding gives the opportunity of sexual reproduction through the production of true potato seed (TPS) at high rates per plant which are not perishable, small in size and free from diseases. To utilise the opportunities of hybrid TPS to the maximum extent, the potato cultivation system should be re-designed from seed-tuber grown crops to TPS-grown crops. During his defence, Luuk van Dijk will explain and discuss the novel cultivation pathways he studied in dozen of trials over 4 years. These trials resulted in successful yields from greenhouse-raised transplanted seedlings and field-sown potato cultivation pathways.