From the Ground Up - McCain Foods Limited

Potato variety and seed potato production
Although hundreds of potato varieties exist, breeders continue to
search for new, hardier ones. Once a new variety is created, it takes
years of experiments to find the best ways to grow it. Varieties that
do well in one region may not perform as well in others. Only when
the best management practices are perfected is the new variety
recommended for french fry production.
3. Each potato variety has its own
characteristic sprout, which emerges
when the tuber is exposed to
sunlight. Shown here is the Kennebec.
7. Each true seed in a berry resulting
from cross-pollination is that of a new
variety, one with characteristics of
the parent plants.
11. To speed up multiplication of new
plants, a tissue culture is done by
cutting the stems and planting them
in test tubes.
1. Each potato variety has a distinctive
colour and shape of flower. The sparse
white flowers of the Russet Burbank
are star shaped.
4. A Russet Burbank sprout. 5. Pollen is extracted from the potato
flower anther. Cross-pollination can
produce new varieties with characteristics
desirable for potato processing.
8. Potato plants are grown from the
tiny seeds, in a greenhouse.
12. These test tubes are kept in
a laboratory under controlled
temperature and light conditions to
promote rapid growth.
9. True seeds from the same plant can
produce potatoes of different colours
and shapes, deriving from earlier
generations.
13. Plantlets from tissue culture are
grown in an aphid-free environment
to produce disease-free small tubers.
2. The Shepody has abundant light
violet flowers with an orange-green
centre.
6. The berries of the potato plant
contain potato seeds, or “true” seeds.
Only pollinated flowers produce seed
berries.
10. New varieties are test-grown
in the field for several years and in
different locations to see how they
respond to local environments.
14. McCain specialists discuss
performance of a new variety in
the field.
America. So if a crop isn’t suitable for french fries, there
is less of a market for it as table stock.
McCain’s agronomists have been instrumental in
developing varieties that are almost equal to the Russet
Burbank in length and solids while less prone to disease.
These include the Santana and the Innovator, an offspring
of the Canadian Shepody variety. Innovators are
now grown for McCain in all the European Union countries,
as well as in Australia, Argentina, and China.
No country is identified with potatoes more than
Russia, with its millions of hectares of land devoted to potato production. Yet in no
country is it more difficult to get the agronomy right. Any potato-processing company
would be interested in a potato-eating country of 143 million people, especially when
many of those people were so desperate for a taste of American-style fast food that they
were willing to line up for hours in the January cold for the opening of McDonald’s first
Russian outlet in Moscow’s Pushkin Square in 1990.
There was no french fry–processing plant in Russia, so in 1990 McDonald’s Russia,
a venture of McDonald’s Canada, had to build its own. McDonald’s was eager for
McCain to build a factory, but before McCain could do that, it needed to build a
market and know if satisfactory raw material would be available.
As of 2007, McCain was continuing to experiment with agronomy in Russia, growing
potatoes on about two hundred hectares, in a continued effort to develop a viable
agriculture program in Russia. Meanwhile, it continued to supply McDonald’s and
other customers from its Polish factory.
94 From the Ground up
Across the chA nnel 95
TOP LEFT: Oksana Lopyreva-
Belyaeva, Pieter Toxopeus,
and Erik Haasken, members
of McCain’s Russian team, in
a trial field in Lipetzk, Russia.
TOP RIGHT: Erik Haasken
and Gera Sitnik check tuber
development.
BOTTOM: Ian Cameron, Dell
Thornley of McDonald’s, Gera
Sitnik, and Oksana Lopyreva-
Belyaeva en route to an
island near Archangelsk, in
northwestern Russia, where
McCain grows seed potatoes
in isolated conditions.