Farmer

We decided to work on potatoes out of all the crops, because like rice and wheat, it’s planted all over the world. The common diseases found in potatoes are bacterial wilt, bacteria soft rot, ring rot and late blight. Recently Late blight has become the most severe disease out of all. We went to potato farmers in Taiwan to find out what kind of potatoes they’re planting. After interview, we found out there are two main types of potatoes currently used in Taiwan: Kennebec, which is over eighty percent, and Tainung No.1.

Varieties

1. Kennebec

Kennebec is originally bred by the United States Department of Agriculture, and is also the most common processed potatoes in the United States and Canada. Kennebec can be used in making French fries, potato chips, while TainungNO.1 cannot. Kennebec has shallow and evenly distributed tuberogemmas, thin and yellow skin, green sprout, oval-shaped tubers and big and light leave color. Kennebec’s tubers size is big, which meets to the eating habit of Taiwanese.

However, Kennebec can be easily infected by potato late blight. Now, the best method to prevent infection is to only use healthy potato seeds to plant. This action requires renewing the potato seeds every year. It takes 80 to 100 days to harvest, which means that it has a short planting time. It can crop about 25 to 30 tons of potatoes per hectare. Owing to the short cultivation period, it will not affect farmers in Taiwan to plant a period of rice in summer. Besides, the cultivation type of Kennebec is most familiar to the farmers. Due to the reasons above, farmers prefer to plant Kennebec .

2. TainungNO.1

TainungNO.1 is bred by Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute. It has light yellow and oval-shaped tubers, shallow tuberogemmas, smooth skin, purple sprout, dark green and glossy leaves and smaller stem and leaves comparing with Kennebec. It has strong resistance to late blight, but it is susceptible to common scab. It also has very weak thermo tolerance, so it is not available to be early planted. The best sowing time in Taiwan is during the bottom of October to the top of November.

The biggest problem for Tainung No.1 is starch produces a large amount of reducing sugar. Under high temperature, reducing sugar reacts with asparagine and produces acrylamide. Excessive intake of acrylamide may cause cancer or damage nerves. (a)It takes about 120 days to harvest and it can crop about 32 to 39 tons of potatoes per hectare. Because it is not a good source of processed potatoes and the farmers do not adapt to the cultivation mode of TainungNO.1, including irrigation, fertilization, medication and so on, the planting area and the production of TainungNO.1 are still at low percentage.

Growth and harvest of tainungNO.1:

Seed

Potatoes are suitable to grow in wet and cool environment. Big temperature difference between day and night, sufficient sunlight and fertile soil are best for potatoes to grow. Central South in Taiwan is the best match for such conditions. We visited Taizhong, Yunlin and Chiayi, which are the largest planting areas of potatoes in Taiwan.

The majority of potatoes are asexually produced. Therefore, the source of seed potatoes determines potato production. Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute (TARI) and Taiwan Seed Improvement and Propagation Station (TSS) are the major agencies responsible for breeding new species and examining healthy seed potatoes.

Healthy potato seeds has to be certified (three-staged certification and production system) before going on the market. Taiwan Seed Improvement and Propagation Station is responsible for tissue culture and breed original seed. Farmers associations in different areas will breed the following generations. After four to five generations, they will sell the tubers to the farmers so the farmers have enough cardinal numbers of potatoes to produce potatoes that meets the demand of the consumers. There are about two thousands hectare planting areas in Taiwan, and it can produce about two to three tons per hectare.

Difficulty

The shortage of healthy seed potato supply

Currently only 60% of healthy seed potatoes are produced in Taiwan, and the remaining 40% are mainly from imports. These causes several serious problems. First, since potatoes are mainly produced asexually, it’s easier for virus/disease to influence the next generation, thus decrease thirty to fifty percent of production. Imported potatoes do not go through three-staged certification and production system, so it’s more likely to carry pathogens. This is the reason of the late blight outbreak in 1997, the largest outbreak in Taiwan. Moreover, those uninspected potatoes will also deliver pathogen to healthy seed potatoes by hybridization, and lead to new diseases.

The short planting period

High temperature inhibits potatoes growth, so farmers need to harvest their potatoes before March. Limited by the space of frozen storage device, there is a period of blank supply in August.

The pressure of opening imported potatoes

Because the shortage of potatoes in Taiwan, potato factories often end up importing potatoes. Therefore, agricultural agencies are pressured to allow the import of potatoes. However, to avoid the transfer of diseases, it is better to avoid import potatoes that grew in similar environments like Taiwan. Besides, dueto the low labor pay, once we agree to open the imported potatoes, it may cause some problems on industrial structure. It will affect the contract farming in processed potatoes and also the fresh potato market. To farmers, it may lower their motivation to plant potatoes.

Economic

We need to show that our improved potatoes are beneficial to the farmers. To them, marketing is as important as fighting the late blight disease.

Price

The potatoes produced in Taiwan has over eighty percent of market share, and the output value is about six hundred million NTD, roughly twenty million USD. The average price of potatoes is about one dollar per kilogram. It will increase to its peak in November and then decrease.

Marketing

Potatoes are either sell as fresh or potatoes. The latter one accounts for the majority. Below is how they are processed

The planting period last about 90 to 120 days. After harvest, the farmers can either sell it or store them in the fridge under 4 degrees Celsius up to two years. Since farmers are able to predict the production of potatoes, selling potatoes is a programmed marketing.

Phases

We can generalize the stages of potatoes marketing into three parts: planting phase, harvest phase, and storage phase.

• Planting phase: This is around August to November. Farmers started to prepare for planting potatoes. The potatoes produced previous years are almost sold out, and the fresh aren’t cropped. Therefore, it reaches the highest price in this phase.
  
  
• Harvest period: It is about December to March the year afterwards. In this phase, the potatoes in the first period are successively cropped. Those potatoes will influx in the market, so the price is decreasing.
  
  
• Storage phase: It is about April to August. In this phase, in addition to supply the demand of the market, the most parts of potatoes will be stored to be frozen vegetables in order to balance the price of vegetables responding to the insufficient supply of summer vegetables when we meets some typhoon or other disaster. The price in this phase will slightly increase back to the average.

Education

For education, we make lots of effort on promoting the central idea of iGEM and also how our project are going to affect our society.We go to school from primary to senior high (and of course university) to tell them how we can use the biobricks to construct a new sequence. We even make a picture to let younger kids understand what we have done.Furthurmore We published some article on magazines to educate the public about potatoes issues and iGEM.

Non government organization/ public

We contacted lots of non government organizations, not only to promulgate our project but also to get support from their resources, in order to get public’s attention. We also attended numerous forums to gather opinions from different perspectives.

"Buy Directly From Farmers"

“Buy Directly From Farmers” is a group dedicated to Taiwanese farmers since 2010 and officially registered as a social enterprise in 2014. Our goal is to connect the potato farmers with this association to provide a solution for a sound environment, creating a harmonious relationship between the city and countryside. We want to bring positive change into the world by letting them understand how their lifestyle and eating habits impact the environment, industry structure and the way that food is grown. We believe only the cooperation between potato farmers and consumers will result in a comprehensive environmental and food evolution. We hope our efforts will jumpstart new jobs for a new generation not only for potato industry but the whole agricultural system, providing youth with viable options in their hometown for a sustainable and promising future in agriculture.

Goal

Our concrete appeal is to

1. Create a new value and enhance the new position of agriculture.
2. Reduce the pollution of the chemical pesticide gradually
3. Solve the problem of imbalance in non programming marketing and over production
4. Increase information of transparency of farmers, empower farmers to have more confidence and hold responsibility in their products
5. Rebuild a better and fair relationship between farmers and consumers
6. Create new jobs for new generation, provide youth with viable job opportunities in their hometowns instead of forcing them into cities
7. Improve the quality of life through Eco-friendly agriculture
8. Create a new generation of consumers who place priority on a healthy and sustainable environment and in turn by themselves

Forums

We participate a lot of forum in order to tell others about reducing pesticide use, potatoes species improvement, how to defend late blight, gene modify technology and so on. We exchange our idea with the participants and also adjust our projects based on their . We tried to exert our influence toward farmers, government, researchers, and the public. We hope that our project can practically carry out and make good use.

The Law

Owing to our prevention part invovled in GMO planting, we need to check out the regulation of GMO to make sure that our project is not illegal. Also, we are going to advocate some juristic modification and promotion.

For agriculture, we care about GMO planting issue. In Taiwan, there are two standards to check GMO planting. One is called “genetic characteristics investigation”, which means whenever we transplant a part of gene sequence, we need to make sure that this part of gene sequence will constantly express generations.

The other one is called “biosafety assessment”, which means we need to detect the modification of the environment whether it changes or not during the GMO planting period.

For environment, because we are going to spread our deffensin into the farm, so we need to check out the environmental regulations. On one hand, we will not break the law. On the other hand, we can learn how the recent regulations restrict the pesticide and make some comparison with our deffensin to show how we will impact on environment on juristic aspect.

For food safety, our ultimate goal is to supply our potatoes into markets and let people have a different choice to eat healthy, safe and cheaper potatoes. Therefore, we need to learn the regulations of GMO food and how they are inspected. In Taiwan, GMO food regulations are still under constructed, so we also devote to share our opinions with the government.