No-nonsense, no-frills potato news stories from around the world
NextGen Potatoes explores the future of the global potato industry through cutting-edge breeding, smart technologies, grower adaptation, and sustainable practices. This section features in-depth articles, interviews, and insights highlighting innovation, resilience, and the next generation of solutions shaping potato production worldwide.
Late-winter warm spells can turn routine ventilation into a condensation trigger when moist air meets a cold pile and cold building surfaces. This Storage Season Essentials article explains dew point in practical terms and provides a step-by-step decision workflow for managing warm-spell risk. It highlights what condensation really looks like, where it forms first, what to do – and what to avoid. A print-friendly checklist table supports consistent, calm ventilation decisions.
The Fruit and Vegetable Growers of Canada (FVGC) is spotlighting a potential shift in how potato varieties could be selected in the years ahead: not only for yield, quality, storability, and disease profile, but also for how efficiently they use nitrogen. Early multi-province research suggests that nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) may become a key selection trait for potato varieties. Recent findings indicate newer cultivars could outperform older ones in yield while requiring less nitrogen.
Thirty years after launching an early potato-industry website in 1996, Lukie Pieterse reflects on how the World Wide Web evolved into today’s always-on digital world – and how the potato community grew with it. The piece traces the shift from scarcity to information overload, arguing that trust, accuracy, and usefulness matter more than ever. At its core is a human story: friendships, mentorships, hard seasons, and a new generation inheriting both powerful tools and bigger responsibilities.
A provisionally accepted Frontiers in Plant Science paper introduces PotatoGuardNet, an AI framework for potato leaf disease detection that both pinpoints suspect areas on leaves and classifies disease type. Using PlantVillage potato images, the authors report 99.41% accuracy and an mAP of 0.9556, plus heatmaps to explain model decisions. The research highlights the promise of faster, more consistent scouting support, while underscoring the need for real-world field validation.
After a year of sustained inquiry and reflection, a clear pattern has emerged: the potato industry is changing not only in practice, but in how it thinks. This editorial explores how deeper questions – around people, ethics, resilience, and legacy – are reshaping industry discourse. It argues that maturity lies not in having all the answers, but in asking the right questions at the right time.
After publishing a great number of stories on Potato News Today this past year, a clear pattern has emerged: the potato industry’s biggest shift is not only technical or commercial, but conversational. This editorial explores how reporting is moving beyond events toward meaning, placing greater emphasis on people, context, candour, and long-term stewardship – without losing sight of yield, science, or economics.
This article argues that potatoes are entering a new era as science, technology, and market pressures converge. Faster, more precise breeding, emerging genetic tools, and measured agronomy are improving resilience and predictability under climate volatility. Storage is becoming instrumented and professionalized, reducing losses and protecting quality. Processing is expanding into high-value ingredients, while circular models turn by-products into revenue. Automation stabilizes labour-intensive operations.
Entering 2026, the “Age of the Potato” article argues that converging pressures and breakthroughs are elevating potatoes from staple to strategic asset. Climate volatility, food security needs, precision breeding, smarter storage, and expanding processing are unlocking higher yields, nutrition, and ingredients. Beyond food, potato starch and by-products are feeding bioplastics, adhesives, paper, textiles, and pharma-cosmetics pathways. If innovation stays grounded, verified, and inclusive, potatoes can help reorganize food and materials systems.
The potato sector is aging in step with wider agriculture, and the risk is no longer abstract: skills, succession, and operational capacity are thinning across farms, storage, research, and processing. Using verifiable statistics from the U.S., EU, Canada, Australia, and Japan, the article explains why potatoes are especially exposed now, then outlines practical levers for growers, processors, researchers, financiers, and retailers to rebuild a viable pathway for younger entrants globally.
Scientists in Punjab, Pakistan, have developed a potato variety, Ijaz-22, that endures smoggy conditions, addressing concerns over worsening air pollution impacting agriculture. With Punjab cities frequently ranking among the world’s most polluted during winter, the Potato Research Institute has created 12 fog-tolerant potato varieties. The focus now shifts to further enhancing smog tolerance to mitigate delays in harvests and reduce crop vulnerability to pests and diseases.
Potato News Today’s 2025 “Potato Word of the Year” is resilience – not as a slogan, but as the practical requirement for staying profitable and stable in a tougher era. The editorial traces how resilience showed up across the potato system: soil performance and “tired” fields, climate volatility, shifting pest and disease dynamics, higher-stakes storage management, energy and compliance pressures, and oversupply-driven market stress. Runner-up words include transition, whiplash, saturation/glut, and deadpan.
MustGrow Biologics Corp. reported that its TerraSante biofertility product significantly enhanced potato yields, size, and quality in farming trials in Washington State and Idaho. A farmer noted a value increase of approximately US$5,000 per acre against a US$180 cost for the product. Results also indicated improvements in soil health, with yield increases between 26% and 40% observed in previous US trials, confirming TerraSante’s effectiveness.
Scientists at The James Hutton Institute, alongside Grampian Growers and Aberdeen University, are developing the Phytoscosmo project to convert potato shaws into valuable ingredients for the pharmaceutical and cosmetics sectors. Approximately 51,200 tonnes of these plant byproducts are produced annually, presenting significant revenue opportunities. The initiative promotes sustainable, tobacco-free sourcing of solanesol, ultimately supporting the Scottish economy and enhancing agricultural resilience.
On World Soil Day 2025, this article examines the rise of “tired” or “deadpan” soils in intensive potato systems. It traces how decades of petro-fertilizer use, short rotations and heavy tillage have weakened soil structure and biology, increasing reliance on synthetic inputs. The piece highlights emerging responses – from cover crops and organic amendments to smarter fertilizer use and soil health testing – and outlines what healthier potato soils could realistically look like by 2035.
World Soil Day 2025, themed “Healthy Soils for Healthy Cities”, turns the spotlight on urban and peri-urban land – where future growth in potato demand and production increasingly meet. This piece links FAO’s global soil campaign to the potato sector’s realities, highlighting why resilient soils underpin yield, quality, storage performance and environmental compliance, and suggesting concrete ways growers and industry can use World Soil Day as a catalyst for action.
This article argues that potatoes are one of the world’s most efficient yet underused crops. It highlights their role across fresh, processed, ingredient and industrial markets, from baby potatoes to starch, flour, protein and bioplastics. It notes that underutilization persists even in North America and outlines what must change – breeding, infrastructure, biorefineries and storytelling – to position potatoes as a true platform crop for food, feed and sustainable industry.
This article explores how the shift from old energy – coal, oil, gas – to new energy – wind, solar, biomass, biogas – is reshaping the potato industry from field to fryer. It explains how fossil fuel dependence drives fertilizer, irrigation, storage and processing costs, and highlights examples of renewables and efficiency upgrades that cut risk, emissions and volatility while strengthening resilience and competitiveness across the global potato supply chain.
This article explores what happens to potatoes after the last trailer leaves the field and why post-harvest storage is now one of the industry’s most critical disciplines. It unpacks early priorities around heat and moisture, curing, airflow, temperature and hygiene, before turning to hotspot management, changing sprout control options, people and safety, and the growing role of digital tools – all aimed at protecting yield quietly sitting in the store.
This feature explores how potato growers worldwide are quietly adopting digital tools – from yield maps and late blight decision support to smart storage sensors and emerging AI analytics. Rather than replacing intuition, these systems act as a second opinion, sharpening decisions in fields and storages while highlighting real barriers like connectivity, cost and data ownership. The result is a gradual, global shift from gut feel to good data, with farmer judgement still in charge.
A new review in the journal Foods by a team of Chinese scientists maps the global potato-processing industry through a Chinese lens. It contrasts high-processing regions in Europe and North America with China’s fast-growing but still underdeveloped sector. The authors detail product streams, technology gaps, sustainability pressures and policy drivers, arguing that automation, branding and greener processing will decide who captures future value in fries, chips, flakes and starch.
This feature takes a grounded look at what Canada’s potato industry could look like by 2040, drawing on current data, climate models, technology pipelines and market signals. It explores climate adaptation, breeding for resilience, smarter automation on farms and in storages, and diversification into new food and industrial markets. The piece highlights which decisions around water, R&D, carbon, contracts and skills in the 2020s will most directly shape those futures.
Potato growers are often seen as lagging behind corn and soybean farmers on climate-smart practices, yet the reality is more complex. This feature compares adoption trends across major potato regions, from North America and Europe to Asia, Africa and Latin America, and unpacks the structural, market and agronomic reasons behind the perceived gap. It highlights emerging leaders, processor and retailer pressure, and where potatoes may actually be ahead on resilience.
This feature examines how potato growers can move from survival mode to long-term stability by treating resilience as a whole-farm strategy – integrating soil health, smarter rotations, robust storage, contracts, financial buffers, better data, and stronger human networks. It argues that in a harsher climate, the most successful businesses will not be those with the highest peak yields, but those able to absorb shocks, adapt, and stay in the game.
Potato farming is drowning in fragmented data, yet only a fraction informs real decisions. This article argues that the next competitive edge will come from turning field, storage, and processing data into simple, repeatable ‘decision engines’. By standardizing records, closing seasonal feedback loops, and using AI for pattern recognition rather than silver bullets, growers, storage managers, and processors can learn faster, cut risk, and protect margins in an unstable climate.
Consolidation is reshaping who holds power in the global potato chain, from fields to fry plants and retailers. A handful of processors, retailers, input multinationals and digital platforms dominate decisions on contracts, prices, varieties and standards, often squeezing growers, workers and communities. The article explains how this buyer power works in practice and outlines tools – from co-ops to fair trading rules and data governance – to rebalance the system.
