Day 10: An added bonus - San Luis Valley Research Center by Madison

As an added bonus we had time and were close to the stop we missed on Friday. Ms. Carolyn Gray was kind enough to give us short tour of the San Luis Valley Research Center where we got to learn more about how new potato varieties are developed.  

 

At the research center they have a clone bank and a culture lab. During the summer they allow high schoolers to help with collecting the pollen from the plants. They have several types of potatoes, some of them being red, chipping and variety potatoes like fingerlings and purple. 

Ms. Carolyn talked about the process in which they cross pollinate the potatoes. They buzz the anthers twice, collecting the pollen, then plant 400 seeds of each type through the greenhouse in little pots. When it is time to harvest, they gather the largest potatoes to keep, and the smaller ones are donated to other universities for research. They also try not to bruise them; it causes black spots in the potato. 

 

 

In the field they plant about 5,400,000 pounds of potatoes in each field. In Colorado they get about 6 - 7 inches of rain each year on average. Making it hard to manage water supply for the plants.

Have you ever seen potato seed? Once the plant flowers and it is pollinated it will produce a berry and inside the berry are hundreds of seeds. These are planted in 3" pots. The seed potatoes are collected from these pots. 

These are the potato berries.