GM Potato Blight trials to go ahead.

[Johnboy]

Defra have given The Sainsbury Laboratory the go ahead on a three year trial on Genetically Modified Potatoes. These are blight resistance trials.
The field trials are to go ahead within the next few weeks.
According to Rachel Sixsmith writing in the Horticulture Week magazine
this week.
www.horticultureweek .co.uk/edibles
JB.

[alan refail]

Hi Johnboy

Link doesn't work. Any information on what genetic engineering is involved in the trials?

[Nature's Babe]

Interesting, I found this, they are using genes from a wild potato relative.

http://www.fwi.co.uk/Articles/2006/12/0 ... ontrol.htm

I grew up in Jersey, C.I.their main exports every year are early potatoes and tomatoes to UK mainland, I don't ever remember crops failing because of blight, they cultivated the land well using rotation, cattle manure, seaweed collected in spring, stacked to desalinate, and spread on the ground in autumn - and the flavour of their produce was excellent. We get from the land what we put back into it, modern methods just take.

[Johnboy]

Hi Alan,
This forum will not allow the whole website to be shown. If you go to
http://www.horticultureweek.co.uk and type Rachel Sixsmith in the search.
It is only a very small article.
JB.

[Johnboy]

Hi NB,
When you grew-up in the CI was a long time ago and we didn't have Organic Gardeners who will not spray even with organically accredited sprays who in my humble opinion are mainly responsible for the very high blight incident in potatoes today.
When I started gardening blight was spoken of but never or very rarely experienced.
All parts of the potato plant was burnt after harvest but today we have clever organic gardeners who seem to know better than 200 years of history and they compost everything including potato haulm and the likes.
Hence the dilemma in which we find ourselves.
I lay the blight incident at the door of the organic faction!
JB.

[alan refail]

Hi Johnboy

Still gets me nowhere

Maybe this is a better, and more informative link..........

http://www.defra.gov.uk/acre/pdf/advice ... r29-01.pdf

[Nature's Babe]

I garden organically Johnboy and I have never experienced potato blight, so it would be hard to pass it on. Also the only time I ever had tomato blight it was imported from gogi berries infected with blight purchased from Thompson and Morgan, they admitted responsibility and replaced with something else - so it can happen the other way round from chemical based to organic. If ever anything showed signs of disease I would burn it, as I burnt the gogi berries rather than put it on the compost or council compost bin as some folk might have. They send stuff all over the country, which may have contributed to the spread of blight, on the other hand what is in my garden stays there not giving rise to problems to me or others Excuse me for saying so but you do sound rather illogically prejudiced against organic gardening. You are entitled to your views personally, but there is no reason to attack and blame others who choose natural or organic

[Johnboy]

Hi NB,
For the first forty years of my gardening life I was very strictly organic
and certain things happened in the organic world and it was no longer organic growing but anti chemical gardening which is not the same thing.
I have watched the Blight incident increase with the anti chemical faction's methodology. World wide blight cost countries collectively around £3.5 billion.
I have no idea where I got blight on my tomatoes a couple of years back because the potatoes were nearly a mile away down wind to the prevailing the other side of a wooded hill. I do not buy in anything in the Solanaceae Family and the potato is the host of the Blight mycelium.
If we could get some truly resistant Potatoes in the stock line then there would be no blight in potatoes and then none in tomatoes, peppers or aubergines.
Sadly the first people to resist using such a potato would be the Organic anti chemical faction. To me they are simply a very selfish bunch of gardeners who give no thought to to their fellow gardeners.
JB.

[Johnboy]

Hi Alan,
Now we are talking turkey. Your thread is most informative. Thank you.
JB.

[Monika]

Can one still use Bordeaux mixture against blight? We have been lucky in recent years in not being badly affected by it but we did use this stuff in years past.

[John Walker]

Blight-resistant potatoes already exist, and are a result of conventional (not GM) plant breeding. They are the result of the work of the Hungarian Sarvari family, and have been developed for both commercial and garden use by the Sarvari Research Trust near Bangor in North Wales. They are the 'Sarpo' varieties (pronounced sharpo), such as 'Sarpo Mira' - the range is growing all the time. There's plenty of information on their website (link below) and I can highly recommend a visit to their annual open day - usually in August.

http://www.sarvari-trust.org/

For anyone wanting more information, a blogpost I wrote last year has more about the 'Sarpo' varieties and how they are ideally suited to earth-friendly organic gardening because of their much-reduced 'carbon footprint' (achieved mainly because they do not need spraying with energy-intensive synthetic fungicides):

http://www.landscapejuice.com/2009/08/n ... ening.html

The 'Sarpo' varieties are available from Thompson & Morgan (some exclusively).

It is a well-known fact that potato blight spores do not survive on tissues which rot down, so composting blight-affected haulms (the leaves and stems) is perfectly safe and acceptable, but any tubers from blighted plants should not be composted. Fresh outbreaks of blight are most likely to arise as a result of poor commercial practice i.e. growers dumping potatoes in the corners of fields, which then grow the following season and provide a fresh source of infection, via airborne spores, which can be carried for many, many miles on the wind.

To suggest that increased incidence of blight is connected with an increase in organic growing of potatoes is frankly ridiculous and very misleading. Strains of the potato blight fungus are constantly evolving and have overcome many of the varieties once thought to be 'resistant'. However the 'Sarpo' varieties show remarkable resilience to blight infection, even under intense pressure from the fungus (and they carry the added caveat of having none of the uncertainty that surrounds untested and unproven genetically modified (GM) crops in general).

With a growing range of non-GM blight-reistant potatoes already giving gardeners and growers excellent results up and down the country, it does rather beg the question as to why we need more expensive research and trials into GM technology (and why anyone would think this is such a good thing).

I am not aware of peppers or aubergines being affected by the potato blight fungus.

[Nature's Babe]

Thank you for that informative post John, I think i will give those sarpo potatoes a try next year. My early potatoes this year are looking healthy and vigorous.

[Johnboy]

John,
I am the first person to give the Sarvari family the credit they are due but it has taken them forty years to get this far and this year they have released several more varieties but not yet for general release. To make Thomson and Morgan their sole outlet in UK is a great piece of commercialism worthy only of the accusations levelled at the GM companies by the organic faction.
There are so many diseases that can affect potatoes that to compost any part of the potato plant is never right. It is best to destroy by fire and use the ash where it is needed.
I do place the demise of the potato at the door of the organic faction and I am old enough to have been able to watch what has happened over the last sixty odd years.
The word commercial applies to both conventional and organic growing so I suspect that your point is lost.
The trouble is that with the organic faction at this present time is that common sense has been lost in a haze of anti chemical rhetoric.
Prevention is better than cure but it only takes one organic grower on an allotment site to refuse to spray preventatively and everybody on that site is in jeopardy of loosing their crop.
Sarpo Mira may be resistant to blight to a degree but they are not that pleasant to taste.
With the GM trial they hope to establish a base for a higher resistance factor which can be quite readily introduced into many of the well known and loved varieties and relatively quickly and not taking another long period of time.
The gap between organic and conventional growing is ever decreasing and most of the innovation is coming from the conventional growers who to my mind will very soon out organically grow the organic because they are more scientifically driven.
JB.

[Shallot Man]

To me, tast is everything.

[Cider Boys]

In response to Nature's Babe stating the blight never affected the potatoes in the Channel Islands, I would respectively suggest that this was due to them growing very early potatoes that are harvested before the blight is a problem than to any organic growing methods.

The problem with Sarpo type potatoes is, as has already been observed, that their taste is poor to the point of being tasteless when compared to traditional maincrop potatoes.

The organic brigade has quite failed to live by its own creed in the case of controlling potato blight and have hypocritically sprayed, when it suited them, their commercial crops with a mixture of sprays that they so love to preach against when used by others.

GM is one of the ways for progress and it is amazes me how anti GM organic people are, it reminds me of the Greens in that they preach against global warming (rightly so) but will not accept Nuclear as one of the ways to assist us all to produce clean energy.

Potato blight seems to be more prevalent now than in the past (before the organic craze) and this is a problem that deserves an unbiased scientific approach rather than the organic mantra of ‘unless it is what we want then we will oppose it’ attitude than many of them display.

John Walker is quite correct in stating old tubers should be destroyed and not composted. However getting all old tubers out of the ground is not so easy on a commercial scale as on an allotment garden.

Barney