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Old May 14, 2013   #52
NathanP
Tomatovillian™
 
Join Date: May 2013
Location: RI
Posts: 183
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Lots of reasons for doing this other than those mentioned above.

I'm doing this partly for the fun of experimentation, and partly to develop better acclimatized lines that are late blight resistant. I won't use chemical pesticides or herbicides or petroleum based fertilizers, and late blight has been a major problem over the past few years for my tomato and potato lines. So that really limits my options in what I grow and how I do it. I'm a home gardener, not a farmer, so nothing I do is very large scale. Nearly everything I am growing this year has genetic resistance to late blight. Not through shortcuts like gmo is trying to do, but real resistance that has been bred into the potato or tomato lines.

There are few sources to turn to to get that, other than those working with very genetically diverse breeding bases. And that is not commercial growers. Growing potatoes from TPS is one way to keep shuffling the genes to try to stay ahead of the arms race with pests and diseases. Growing only from clones is a losing battle, as those crop lines are so stabilized they are stuck. That's a dead end, that eventually all of those lines will likely eventually lose out in the evolutionary sense. It is the resources of genetic diversity that offers the best chance for crops to respond and overcome the challenges they are faced with.

With the genetic bottleneck in potatoes since the 1800's, the common sense answer seems to be to go back to the source ... either traditional landraces or wild potato types to try to correct the lack of diversity. I am not a geneticist, but from what I have been able to read, nearly all commercial potatoes in North American and much of Europe descend from one single potato line. That's not a good thing if you're a long term thinker.
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