 Well, hi everyone. My name is Julie Garden Robinson, and I'm your host again for today's Field to Fork webinar. This is brought to you by North Dakota State University Extension. In fact, this is the ninth year we've done the series and we're really glad that you joined us and continue to join us every week. We have all of the webinars archived from all the previous years and the link is on our Field to Fork webinar page. We also provide a certificate of attendance on the website. It is posted with the recording. The next slide shows the upcoming webinars. We hope you join us for these as well. The next slide is a fun part. This shows the webinar controls and because of the large number of participants, we invite you to post your comments and questions in the chat. So let's practice finding and using the chat box. You can ignore the Q&A box because I'll be copying the questions out of the chat. Click to open it and then put in your city and state where you are. The next slide provides an acknowledgement. As you work on telling us where you are, I have a special request. This program is sponsored in part with grant funding from USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service, and I will ask all of you to complete the short online survey that will be emailed right after today's webinar. As a thank you, we are providing prizes every week to the lucky winners of the random drawings and we have more than one type of prize. So keep on entering and be sure to give us your complete address. You will need to scroll down to today's date on the link to the survey because we combine all our data from various years. So scroll down until you see the 2024 date. Again, welcome to today's webinar, and I am pleased to introduce today's speaker. Dr. Asanta Susie Thompson is an associate professor in the plant sciences department at North Dakota State University, and I've known her and worked with her for years. She is the potato breeder and she conducts potato research in North Dakota and in Minnesota. Susie is a native of Barnsville where she grew up on a farm and was active in FFA and 4-H. She earned her bachelor's and master's degree from NDSU in agronomy and horticulture, respectively, and she earned her PhD from the University of Idaho. So welcome Susie, we're glad you're here. Thanks so much for that introduction, Julie. So the title of my talk today is Spuddles, Vader Tots and Small Fries. Let's Talk Potatoes. Now, I know none of you can respond to me, but you may or may not know what some of these terms are. I happen to collect a lot of potato, not necessarily trivia, although I collect that too. And part of that would be collecting some jokes about potatoes. So what do you get when it rains potatoes? Well, spuddles, of course. And today it is a little bit rainy here in the Fargo area and I have not seen any spuddles. But I feel like with the work that I do, oftentimes it is raining potatoes. What do you call potatoes that turn to the dark side? Well, those would be Vader Tots, of course. And if you were here in my office, you would see that I even have a Mr. Potato Head Darth Tater. And I have quite a collection of varying Mr. Potato Heads. And finally, what do you call a baby potato? Well, a small fry, of course. So today we're going to talk about a lot of things, potato. I'm going to share the importance of the potato to North Dakota and Minnesota or the Northern Plains. We're going to talk about nutritional value of potato, different market types, and also talk about culinary quality and potato agronomics. So just to get everybody kind of on the same page a little bit about botany, the potato is a member of the Nightshade family and it is called the Solanaceae. The cultivated potato is selenium tuberosum, and this would be the types of potatoes that we would find in our grocery stores or if we're buying frozen products out of the freezer section. Potato is a relative of tomato, eggplant, pepper, tobacco, bitumia, and the Nightshade weeds. We grow potatoes for the underground tubers like you can see in the photos here. It is considered to be an herbaceous dicot, and we grow it as an annual. And of course, herbaceous means that the stems are not woody. They're succulent and pliable. And our cultivated potato is tetraploid, meaning that we have four sets of chromosomes. Some of our wild species are not only tetraploids, but they are diploids, and also the ploidy can go up to hexaploids, so six sets of chromosomes. And thus the genetics of potato are kind of complicated, would be a good word. The history of the potato. Potatoes were indigenous to the Andean region, and if you can see my mouse, you can see the green and orange dots stretching all the way from southern Chile, near the Chilaue Island, up through the Andes, through Central America, and wild potato species like Jamesii or fendlerii are even found in the four corners region of the U.S. So, utilization is documented as early as 7,000 years ago, and of course the Incas are who are credited with domesticating and cultivating potato. Potato was introduced into Europe in about 1570. Spanish conquistadors carried it from South America to Spain. By 1580, potato was being grown in England. And potato came to the New World when settlers moved here, and it is documented that potato arrived in the New World as early as the 1700s. Interestingly, some work done by colleagues at University of Wisconsin, they found that potato actually came in both in the west coast of the U.S. as well as the east coast. Potatoes arriving in the area that is now California came from Chile, while the potatoes that arrived on the east coast came via Europe. A little bit about world potato production, potato is widely adapted, growing all the way from sea level, or I guess in the case of the Netherlands, even below sea level, all the way to the highest mountain peaks in the Andes. The leading country and the colored areas that you can see here on our map, the leading country in terms of production is China, and it out-yields everybody by about two times. They produce about 94.3 million hundred weight annually. India is the second largest producer of potatoes, and they grow about 54.2 million metric tons annually. Ukraine is number three at 21.3, and the U.S., and these are 2022 statistics, the U.S. comes in at about 19 million metric tons of production annually, with Russia rounding out the top five. But you can see all the dots across our screen here as to where potato is produced. It's produced on every continent. For U.S. production, we have the majority of our potato production across the northern tier of states, so from Maine all the way to the Pacific Northwest, and we also have pockets of potato production in states like Nebraska and Colorado. They would also be participating in the fall seasonal group. Areas like California, Texas, and Florida produce for the spring crop, and then areas like Missouri or Maryland and South, or North Carolina, excuse me, would be producing for the summer market. Potato is produced under both irrigated and non-irrigated conditions, and that's what makes potato production unique in North Dakota and Minnesota is that we have large acreages of both types of production. So if a person is to go to their National Ag Statistics Service statistics annually, you will find that our yield per acre, our average yield across the state of North Dakota and Minnesota is slightly less than four areas that are all irrigated, like Washington, Oregon, Idaho, or Texas. And of course I have to provide a little bit in terms of statistics. So our U.S. total acreage planted and harvested in 2023 was 964,000 acres planted and just under that amount were harvested. The total production for the U.S. in 2023 exceeded 434,000,000 weight, and the value, I don't have the 2023 value yet, but the 2022 value was at more than $4.8 billion. In terms of acreage planted and harvested in North Dakota and Minnesota, and I apologize to some of you that are obviously not in Minnesota and North Dakota, I happen to see a chat come up from somebody that is listening in way in Ohio. So I apologize for kind of being a bit more focused specifically at North Dakota and Minnesota, but thought the majority of our listeners today would be from those two states. So in 2023, and you can see this goes from back to 1999, certainly before that the acreage in North Dakota was even higher, but we have kind of flattened out, shall we say, in terms of our acreage, although it might be climbing slightly. In 2023, North Dakota planted 76,000 acres of potatoes and harvested about 75,500 of those. In Minnesota, they planted about 45,000 or excuse me, 45,500 acres and harvested about 45,000. So both are significant producers when it comes to acreage. North Dakota ranks third in the U.S. in terms of acreage as well as in usually in total production, although occasionally we flip flop with Wisconsin because again, we're growing some potatoes on non-irrigated acres whereas Wisconsin irrigates their potatoes. And Minnesota ranks about seventh and of course the leader in terms of potato production in the U.S. is Idaho and Washington would come in second. In terms of total production, this is a very busy graph. The brown line on the top is actually the yield per acre for Minnesota and because they have more irrigated acres than North Dakota does, they tend to have the average yield that exceed 400 hundred weight to the acre. In North Dakota, which is the orange bar, we and you can see that we've had a gradual increase. There's a little blip in 2021 and 2022 because we had some potatoes be frosted or frozen during harvest and actual blizzard in 2021. So some acres had to be left and that resulted in a lower yield per acre. But in 2023, the average yield in North Dakota was 350 hundred weight to the acre and that was a 50 hundred weight increase over the year before. Total production is way at the bottom and that's simply because those values are in the millions of dollars. And so those are our blue, our light blue and our dark blue lines down here. And in 2022, after use 2022, statistics for or no, excuse me, for 2023, the total production was like, oh, I'm talking, yes, I'm still talking about production. Sorry, got confused there. Some of the lines, the color is so similar. The total hundred weight for North Dakota production was 26.3, which was up significantly. That would be our blue line down here. And then for Minnesota, it was at 18 million hundred weight. Now what I was going to talk about was the value and that is with our purple line for North Dakota and our nearly black colored line for Minnesota and the value. And this is where I only have 2022 statistics. The value for 2022 for North Dakota exceeded $280 million. So more than a quarter of a billion dollars of potatoes were produced in North Dakota in 2022. And in Minnesota, again, they exceed a quarter of a billion dollars at 237.4 million. So potato is very significant to our production area, even though it isn't necessarily grown on a lot of acres. And we have different market classes. So in this top right hand photo, you'll see round whites. Here in North Dakota and Minnesota, we don't produce round whites for the fresh market, but instead we produce round whites that are used for chip processing. And the two end uses have different quality characteristics. So to be a good chipper, we need to have high dry matter and low sugars. For the fresh market, it's okay to have less dry matter, less starch and to have higher sugars. We're going counterclockwise here. Our long russets and whites, we grow some for both processing and table stock, but predominantly for the processing industry here in North Dakota and Minnesota because we have three French fry plants. I failed to mention we also have two chipping potato plants located in Minnesota, one of which is quite close to the Fargo-Moorhead area. So qualities that are important for our long russets or long whites for frozen processing again include that high dry matter or high starch content and low sugars because the sugars are what turns things brown in the mailer reaction when we process them or cook them in the presence of heat. Our next photo, the Red River Valley, has been famous for their red table stock potatoes since probably before I was a little girl on a seed potato farm. We produce potatoes that have exceptional color and part of that has to do with our soil type that we have here in the Red River Valley, but the North Dakota State University Potato Breeding Program has really excelled at breeding beautiful red potatoes with the most intense and bright red skin color of most U.S. breeding programs anyway. And then lastly, as we round out our clock, we come to our heirloom or specialty types and here I hope everyone can appreciate the variation all the way from, of course, the three market types that I just talked about, we predominantly in the U.S. want white flesh. So they're also with people have heard of varieties like Yukon Gold. This would have been Yukon Gold and then these would have been some from our breeding program. You can see that the color of the flesh varies everything from white to the deepest, darkest purple and some of them are nearly black. And like the reds for table stock are air and yellows for table stock are heirloom or specialty types. Generally, it's okay to have a lower starch content and to maybe have a little bit higher of sugar levels. So how do we use all of these market types? This would be a little information in terms of utilization about 88% of the potatoes that we produce are used for human consumption. 39% of that would be for frozen. So things like making French fries or tater tots or waffle fries. All the types of frozen potatoes, 26% of our potatoes are for the fresh market. And in the picture, I actually have a picture of two of our red selections in our breeding program, but both of them have yellow flesh and you can see the one on the left is a lot lighter, but the one on the right is just very rich and beautiful. And hopefully someday that one will be a named variety. 22% of our potatoes are utilized for chip processing as you can see in the lower left hand photo. 7% are dehydrated. So for things like flakes or those little, I can't say her name now, Betty Crocker, the Betty Crocker potatoes, potato buds, all of those would be dehydrated potatoes. There is a fast moving market segment. I can remember just a couple of years ago where refrigerated potatoes were not on the chart at all. And now they make up 4%. And that's because we are seeing an increase in offerings. For example, simply potatoes, those are already diced up so you can make hash browns or graded so that you can make hash browns. There's also a lot of other offerings where there are little microwavable trays or pouches and some of these might include interesting fat for roasting, even things like duck fat or goose fat, and then also fresh herbs or different seasonings. So this is a very fast moving segment of our industry. And then 2% is other. The reason why we don't have 100% of our potatoes being used for human consumption is we experienced some losses in storage due to things like shrink. We use some potatoes for seed potatoes. And then of course there is, we hope, sometimes a small amount of loss because the tubers are cut or they're misshapen, or maybe they have some other type of defect or have a bit of disease. And I didn't talk about this bottom picture, but I'm one of those. I like to make brownies that incorporate mashed potatoes. It makes them moist and rich. So I have talked about a lot of quality issues during the last couple of slides, and quality relates to a lot of different things, just like the saying beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. Similarly, that is the case with potatoes. So quality can relate to visual appeal, the size, the shape, the appearance, absence of disease or defects. It relates to the flavor, texture, sloughing, as we can see in this picture here, where high dry matter potatoes when they're boiled tend to slough, can sometimes fall apart so much they're just a bit of glue or goo on your plate. Nutritional value is important, enzymatic browning, after cooking darkening, and the list can probably go on and on. But again, culinary preference is that of the consumer or the person utilizing the potatoes. For our markets like the chip market or the frozen processing, we have strict market specifications that our growers have to meet or we breeders need to breed for. And then of course, there's glycoalkaloid content. Glycoalkaloids are things like choconin and solanine. If anybody has left potatoes out and they've gotten green, that's an increase in those glycoalkaloids. Those are deterrents to feeding on by insect pests, animals, etc. And the glycoalkaloids also provide some protection to the plants from diseases. But we have a safety level of 20 milligrams per 100 grams fresh weight. So I always encourage everybody because most of us don't know if we're allergic to glycoalkaloids or not. But if you have a green area on your potatoes, perhaps you can peel that away. And then important characteristics are starch content and sugar content, particularly when it relates to French fries or to potato chips. I like to consider potatoes an attritional powerhouse. I was just having this conversation this morning out at an event for Grand Farm. But many people are taught that potatoes are unhealthy and that they strictly are a starch. I would argue that they have way more importance nutritionally than that. Potatoes basically have zero fat. It's what you put on them. They have no cholesterol and they have no sodium. And an average five ounce potato, something about the size of a baseball or a little bit bigger, only is 110 calories. But it provides 15% of our daily requirement for potassium, 30%, even the white fleshed ones provide 30% of our daily requirement for vitamin C. And very important for young women are B vitamins and potato supplies 10% of B6. This is perhaps a little bit fuzzy of a schematic, but I like to use this slide because it has the different fruits and vegetables. And if you can note here, French fried potatoes provide 579 milligrams per 100 grams of cooked product of potassium. And I think we all think that spinach is very healthy and it is healthy and delicious. It provides 486, so French fried potatoes are nearly 100 milligrams higher. Baked potato comes in second banana. A lot of us are runners or like to work out outside and we oftentimes think that a banana is a convenient way to get some potassium to help with those aches and pains. Only 391 milligrams compared to that 579. And down here, green beans cooked are at 146. So hopefully this provides you with a little bit of impetus to consider a baked potato instead of a banana the next time you are doing a long run. Dietary fiber, again, potatoes are coming quite high. Peas are the highest when we eat their edible pods at 5.5 grams per 100 grams. And French fried potatoes come in second at 3.8. Sweet potatoes are third and carrots at 3.3. And I used to always think that our lettuces were quite high in fiber along with things like cucumbers, but both of those come out to be at the far end of the spectrum. For those of us that might be interested in the sugars and starches, I thought I would share this. A lot of our potatoes that we buy as table stock, fresh market potatoes, our reds and our yellows would have lower specific gravity in this 1.065 region. What does that mean in terms of percent dry matter? Around 17% or a little bit higher. And that is about 11% starch. Our potatoes for the French fry industry have to exceed a specific gravity of 1.080, which comes out to be about 21% dry matter. Well, certainly the ones for French fry need to be higher than 21%. And that equates out to be about 14% starch. For our chip potatoes, their average specific gravity will be a right around 1.092 or this 1.095. That's 24% dry matter and about 17% starch. So our potatoes that are high in starch tend to be low in sugar and our potatoes that are lower in starch tend to be higher in sugar. And these potatoes that we would use for the fresh market, we want them to fold together when we're making things like soup or stew or potato salad, for example. Or when we fry them in our leftover boiled potatoes, when we're making new potatoes and peas, for example. The next day we may be fried up those leftovers, they hold together better. And I hesitate to use the word waxy because one time a chef corrected me, but they do. They have a little bit more of a waxy or creamier texture than our higher dry matter potatoes where they might have a little bit more of a mealy texture, for example. I had perused some questions that had come in in previous years that for the field the fork series and people had questions about nutritional value. So I cost in some work that my group has done, not so recently anymore, but with different potatoes of different flesh colors. So we had three different red fleshed materials we had three different blue or purple fleshed ones. We had three different yellows and then three different white skin ones. And really our take home message is, and this is the typical scenario, when we cook our potatoes, the amount of anthocyanin actually increases. And we used a steam bag, not a steamer, but instead steamed our potatoes in a steam bag. And then we also microwaved the potatoes because with our busy lives, a lot of people are using those technologies. And so you can see that our anthocyanins increased from the uncooked to the cooked and our darker fleshed potatoes and darker skin potatoes had higher anthocyanin pigmentation. This slide relates to our antioxidant activity and the same scenario follows through. Our colored fleshed potatoes have higher levels, whether they're raw or cooked, but we tend to see an increase in the antioxidant levels and activity when we cook. NDSU has a long history of potato breeding. They initiated their potato breeding program in about 1930. Since then we have released 26 or 28, I guess I haven't counted lately, varieties. And I have been involved with releases starting with Dakota Jewel. Our most recent one is Dakota Dawn that is pictured here. That was a 2022 release. Dakota Russet is pictured in the photo above and that was a 2012 release. But it's exciting because it was recently accepted by one of the world's largest utilizers of frozen French fries. And it's very exciting for our growers because that particular clone, or now cultivar, not only has wonderful attributes in terms of French fry quality, but it also possesses some disease resistance to things like verticillium wilt or pink rot. But perhaps more importantly, it has a shorter maturity. So it is a mid-season maturing variety, which is very important for our producers. A lot of the materials that are acceptable for frozen processing come from the Pacific Northwest and they have a much longer growing season than we have. So this is very grower friendly and hopefully everyone can see how beautiful it is, grower friendly for our industry in North Dakota. Now Dakota Dawn is a fun one and I didn't show a picture with it cut open, but it has this buff colored skin splashed with purple. When you cut it open it has a rich yellow flesh, almost the color of the band across the top of our slides today. And it is available through a seed catalog. Okay, I'm going to switch gears and talk about some agronomics. I'm going to talk about agronomics though from a garden standpoint, much more so than from a grower standpoint. But there are some going to be some similarities between the two. So the first thing I want to talk a little bit about is propagation. And hopefully everybody here knows that we predominantly propagate potatoes using these cut seed pieces. No growers don't cut them by hand, but we do on our breeding program because we have such a little tiny lot. Growers use big fancy cutting machines and they also plant using big planters like in this photograph. So these would be considered asexual propagation or clonal propagation because technically every one of the plants that grows from one of these tubers should be just like its mother tubers. We can also use plantlets that would be coming from tissue culture. Again, that is asexual reproduction, but that's utilized mostly either for research purposes or for our seed certification programs where they need to start out with clean disease-free plantlets and then do a year of propagation in the greenhouse and then the material goes to the field to help minimize the picking up of diseases while being propagated out in the field. And then the kind of little series of pictures across the bottom, we potato breeders. We are who uses sexual reproduction to produce true potato seed. So we cross flowers in the greenhouse, results in those little tomatoes that form on the top of our potato plants, sometimes in our gardens because bumblebees do the pollinating. And these fruits have nothing to do with tuberization under the ground. And even though our plants might cross and form these fruits, our tubers are not being crossed. What we're after though as a breeder are the little itty-bitty seeds in these fruits. And just roughly on average, our fruit size will be around the size of a crocky marble, sometimes a little bit larger. If all 250 ovules were fertilized, if you have the chance and I apologize because we're obviously doing this by a zoom, normally if I'm in a group of people, I tend to keep a little packet of true seeds in my pocket. And you would find that they are about half the size of even a tomato seed, except for some of the wild tomato species, seeds that are small, and only about a third or even less the size of pepper seeds, for example. And because of the complex genetic nature of potato being tetraploid, every one of the brother and sister seeds in one of those fruits can be different. They can have different flower colors, different maturities, different tuber colors. When I cross two reds, depending upon how many genes for red skin color they have, I might have every color of the red rainbow from white to purple. So a little bit about planting. Potato is a cool season crop, so our optimum daytime temperature would be in that 65 to 75 degree range. I like the 72 degree days. When we have high temperatures for people like me, if I'm in the greenhouse trying to do crossing, when we have temperatures over 85 degrees, then our pollen starts to die, but also photosynthesis starts to decline under hot temperatures. Cold temperatures, of course, potato is damaged, like most other crops down at about that 32 degree range. And our tubers under the ground when our soil temperatures get to that 32, 30, 28, our foliage will handle sometimes the 28 degrees, but if the soil temperature gets to be around 28 degrees, we can start to see some damage to our tubers. The organ here under the ground that we're hoping to eat. Potatoes have a high water requirement and part of that has to do with they have a shallow root system. It might be shallower or not as shallow as some of the other crops that you might be growing in your garden like lettuce or radishes, for example. But we only have a rooting depth of about 18 inches. Whereas if I think of a crop like alfalfa, it can go down six feet into the soil. So potato has a high water requirement. And I should mention the potatoes are about 80% water and only about 20% dry matter. So we need water. Potatoes do best on a well-drained soil, something that is in that sandy or sandy loam or even loam soil. They don't do as well on very heavy soils like we have right here in the Red River Valley proper in this Fargo area. But once we start getting out where the soils become a little bit sandier, going towards the beach of Lake Agzee, our soils are very, very well suited for potatoes. When we plant potatoes, we want to plant them about four inches deep, so a lot deeper than a lot of our other vegetables that we're planting. And typically we will plant in rows that are 30 to 36 inches apart and within the row, depending upon what type of market or how big we want our potatoes to get, we would plant within those rows at about 8 to 12 inches apart. A lot of our growers, especially for processing, will be in that 12 inches. And out in the Pacific Northwest, they will plant varieties like Russet Burbank, sometimes as far away as 14 inches. So the little cartoon that I have here on the top is our potato growth stages, all the way from sprouting to senescence, where our leaves are starting to die and our tubers are maturing. And I wanted to also have the average daily water use. So at the peak during the summer, in mid-July to mid-August, our potatoes are using about a quarter to a third of an inch of water. So in season, we need to think about healing off our potato growers' hill. And I wanted to show this so that you could see the ends of the hills. These ones happen to be a little bit flatter than some hills at some sites where I plant potatoes, but gardeners also might want to heal. And healing is important because here we can get heavy rainfalls. And so by having the hills, the furrows help run the water away from our potatoes while they like moisture. They don't like to stand in water for long periods of time, and they also don't want to be completely dry either. And then another purpose of healing is that extra soil is around our tubers, so it helps to prevent greening. And the photo here that I'm showing those hills, this is kind of probably around the last week of June because you can see that the potatoes, some of them are starting to flower. They haven't closed the rows yet. And so we definitely want to be doing that. For fertility management, typically for gardeners, I would recommend putting most of your fertilizer, apply it before you dig up the plot area that you want to plant your potatoes in. I would use something like 15, 30, 15. And for our early maturing varieties for gardens, something in the range of 150 pounds of nitrogen would be about right. Phosphorus is super important for potato because it is important not only for our quality attributes, but also for helping set our skins. For watering, obviously growers can use things like irrigators, and we as gardeners can also use something like that. My recommendation would be applying about one inch of water per week, and you want it to be uniform, and you can apply that at one time, or you can do two waterings of a half an inch, for example. Our growers, depending upon variety, have to be able to, and then the efficiency of their irrigation equipment, have to be able to water about every two and a half to three days, depending upon the cultivar and the market that they are producing potatoes for. But obviously, we gardeners, or particularly our non-irrigated farmers like we have in the northern end of the Red River Valley here, and even the southern end, we have to rely on Mother Nature for our moisture. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about pest management, and the first thing that I'll talk about is weed control. We don't recommend gardeners use things like herbicides in your garden, and the reason is you have such a myriad of plant species that if you're trying to control a weed in your potatoes, you're probably going to control something else that is a neighbor. So I tend to recommend either utilizing a little cultivator, either a hand cultivator or a push model, or just doing hand-weeding. As I mentioned, potato is a relative of the nightshades, and all of these are photographs of the nightshades, and they can be very problematic in our area. But more so, our common weeds like red-red piglet, kosher, lamb's quarters, purslane, are the ones that we see. Purslane to me is my nemesis, and in my seed potato fields, I am also not a fan of waterhemp. Waterhemp can be hard to control. We just don't have a lot of good chemistries. Insect pests, again, one of the questions that I read coming from some of Julie's surveys were about Colorado potato beetle. So I have three photographs here. This is an adult Colorado potato beetle. This is a larvae, and then this is the kind of damage that they can do left unchecked. We can use some products in our gardens. I would recommend things like Blackhawk, which is one of the spinosa, or its active ingredient is a spinosid. So you can use those spinosids. They're a natural compound found in our soil, and they control our beetles very well, currently here. I know that states to the east of us, they're already starting to see development of resistance by the beetles. Something else that you can do that's not so enticing is go out and pick those off, or they used to use little cans of kerosene and knock them off into that because that would kill them. The other picture that I have here in the right hand corner is of aphids, and these happen to be green peach aphids. But a lot of aphid species will vector viruses and potato crops, and they can not only curl up your foliage, but we certainly should not be carrying over seed from our garden to the next year because aphids will spread viruses. And you're going to see a decline in tuber size, tuber yield, and also might have some internal problems with materials like that. There are other insects that we occasionally see, things like army worms or wireworms. Wireworms we don't see above the ground. Sometimes cutworms will come in to our gardens and cut off some plants, including potato. But wireworms, we tend to see more of the damage when we go to harvest the tubers. You'll see a little bit of a hole, kind of looks like maybe a quarter of an inch at the most in diameter, but wireworms will feed on potato. Especially if you have just taken an area of your yard out of grass or an area adjacent to your farm yard that maybe had been in meadow or hay with alfalfa and things like that. Those are areas where we tend to see more issues with wireworm and even things like cutworms where it has just come out of turf. Diseases, potato has a lot of diseases, so it keeps the plant pathologists here at NDSU, Plant Diagnostic Lab, our Extension Potato Specialist, Dr. Andy Robinson, and myself busy. I'm trying to breed for resistance and they're trying to help everybody manage the diseases. So the top picture is a picture of late blight. And again, this whole list of diseases that I have here and there are many, many more. We are trying to develop resistance too. Things like late blight, you can use fungicide applications in your garden, you can run down to any big box store or garden center and pick up products that are safe to use. If you do find plant materials with late blight and you are growing a garden and if you have late blight in your tomatoes or your potatoes and you have potato acreage close by, you should immediately remove those plants. They are not going to produce anything that is going to be a value for you. That would just be a good neighbor. But otherwise, if you're in an area where there is no potato production and I will tell you that the spores of late blight can move in a thunderstorm up to 50 miles. So if you have potatoes being grown commercially within that area, it would be kind if you remove those plants. But anyway, this is what the symptom and it's on the underside of the leaf. On the upper side of the leaf, you might see something that looks like a halo where this white mycelium is. Those are telltale symptoms of late blight. The picture here is a picture of verticillium wilt. Verticillium is the same organism that causes fire blight and things like our prunus species, our crab apples, apples, cherries, things like that. We get this flagging appearance in potato just like we do when we see fire blight in our fruit crops. It will clog up the vascular system of the potato plants and for the most part our tubers won't be as big. The picture here is a picture of, and not very clear, it's not very enlarged, but that particular plant has potato virus Y. Not so important for gardeners, although again, it clogs up the vascular system of our plants and our tubers don't enlarge fully and sometimes the plants die quickly. So we might not get any tubers at all, but that's a very important disease for seed potato growers. Another reason why you should be purchasing certified seed potatoes at your garden center. Some grocery stores in small towns carry them, but please get certified seed. You're going to be so much happier. Do not use potatoes that you bought in the grocery store produce section because those have been treated with sprout inhibitors and they probably won't even produce a plant at all. Or if they do produce sprouts, you may not get a plant that emerges from the ground and you may just get little tiny tubers stuck onto the seed piece that you planted. Common scab is in this lower right hand picture and you can see this one is what we would call a pit scab. There are also some that produce a raised type of scab. This again is a soil pathogen or it's a pathogen that is soil born, meaning it lives in the soil. When we have high pH soils, we can get common scab. When we have very acid soils, we also get what people refer to as acid scab. If we plant scabby tubers, then again, we're going to have a greater incidence, most likely of scab. Scab tends to be worse when we do not have uniform watering. We don't want the material to be soggy wet, but we want it to be a nice moist. Silver scurf I don't have a picture of, but I think everybody has seen round reds turn into brown rounds. It's just a cosmetic disease. You'll get more of it in your soil if you plant seed that has scurf on it. This picture is a picture of black scurf. That's that dirt that won't wash off and it's caused by Rhizogtonia. Again, if we were to plant that tuber more than likely over the course of time, we will have a buildup of Rhizogtonia in our soil. Over the course of time, if we plant potatoes in that same area, we're going to see more and more tubers that have that black scurf. Again, it doesn't really hurt us. It just is detracting from the appearance. If I happen to note some, number one, if I'm in my selection nursery, I tried to not select those, but number two, if I do get a potato with some scurf on it, I just peel that away when I'm cooking. Let's see, then we have some physiological disorders. I just put a few pictures so people can see what some of those look like. An external defect would be where we get growth cracks. We used to tease that growth cracks were iron blight, and that's because potato farmers used to cultivate up until the potato rows were just about touching each other. Now we don't do that, but we do see growth cracks due to uneven watering or uneven growing conditions. We also see it when people drift herbicide onto our potato fields or onto our gardens. Secondary growth would be these knobs here. Also was a picture of a knob. That's where we have apical dominance breaking and those Maristems that are in those regions start to grow, usually triggered by heat or heat stress, and that can be mitigated with light irrigation. Hollow heart and brown center, this is a picture of some hollow heart. Some get to be as big as these violin cases, others are just even smaller than this, very tiny and no discoloration, but those are actually caused due to a physical tearing of the cells because there was some type of a stress, and then when that stress got alleviated through cooler temperatures or water, whatever helped the crop take in nutrients, the potatoes literally explode or the cells literally tear apart on the inside, and the converse, of course, would be these growth cracks on the outside. Mischapen tubers, we have some varieties like eumatillerus that will form tubers that look like baseball gloves, and we can find some that look like hearts. Those are, again, caused by stresses. Then bruising, I have two pictures. One here is skinning, and the other is black spot bruise. Skinning is caused because our skins are not set, so we need to think about that when we are approaching harvest. And then black spot bruise happens when we mishandle our potatoes. We drop them, we're rough with them, somebody slams a burlap bag down. That causes bruises like that. Harvest and storage, just briefly. Skinning and bruising is important, so of course our growers do what is called vine kill in many cases, and they use vine desiccant. Most of us in our gardens, we just let our vines mature out and then maybe leave them in the ground for a week or two, and then dig them with a fork, and then use some curing in our storage area, our cellar. I happen to keep my potatoes in my entryway closet because it's kind of cold there or cooler, and it's dark. But when we're curing our potatoes, we typically want the temperature to be in that 50 to 60 degree range, but high humidity, and again we need them to be in the dark. For storing potatoes, our industry stores seed potatoes at about 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Our table stock growers store at 38 to 40 for the most part, and then for chip processing and french fry processing, most of our growers store in the 48 degree range, but a few will store down to 45 degrees. And I'm putting emphasis on these traits in our breeding program, so I'm actually trying to develop varieties that will still chip out of 38 or even 42, or make french fries out of 38 or 42 and be those nice white colors. Light is important as I mentioned because of the glycoalkaloids and the potential waste. And with that, I would be open for questions. All right, you have quite a few here, so I'm going to go pretty quickly. Just so everyone knows, Susie and I are working on a new pocket guide to potatoes. We have a number of publications on our website, but I will ask you, Susie, for your brownie recipe with potatoes. Okay, I will jot down a note so I can share that. I have another potato recipe that I thought, this one might be a good one for that pocket guide too, and I call it my harvest casserole, so I'm going to be sharing two potato recipes with you. Very good. There was a question about square foot gardening where some call for four potatoes per square foot and sometimes one. Do you have a recommendation? I guess partly it would depend what variety I was growing. If I was growing something like a red Norland, which it has a small vine and the tubers can get pretty big. It matures early. I would probably go, I would be more tempted to try the four. But if I'm going to be growing something where I want a nice sized russet potato, a baking size of potato, and I don't like little walnuts, I want something that's five, six inches long, then I would be more tempted to go with the one first. All right, another question, and I'm sorry we won't get to all of them today, but there might be some resources we can share with all of you. If you allow your potatoes to develop seeds, do you still get tubers? Excellent question. And yes, we still, even in our greenhouse pots, when we are crossing in the greenhouse, we will get tubers that are five, six, eight ounces large. Drive by a potato farmer's field, they have a full canopy of flowers with some varieties and they get beautiful tuber size profiles up to 10 ounces and bigger. Good. Can you eat potatoes with the hollow heart or brown center? Absolutely. As far as I know, there is nothing wrong with those areas. It doesn't look very pretty. So a lot of times if I cut open a baked potato and there is one of those hollows, I just lift it out. And maybe I don't eat that part. But sometimes if I'm hungry and I didn't notice that there was a little lens shaped hollow, I eat it and I haven't died yet. Here someone says, a couple of years ago, I planted both brown and red potatoes. All the seeds produced new potatoes, but they were all red. Why would that be? I am wondering if the potatoes that you were calling brown actually didn't have a disease called silver scurff or if you bought them at a garden center or somewhere, or got them from a friend, they maybe had treated them with seed treatment. And fur bark is brown and fur bark is a great seed piece treatment. You can buy some that has fungicides in them, but fur bark alone actually has fungicidal properties. So it is a wonderful thing to use if you're trying to produce your garden or your farmer's market potatoes organically. There are a number of questions about potato pests and voles and a lot of different things. Do you or Andy have something online that would kind of take them through that process? I know that Andy has a lot of things online related to different diseases, whether they be soil pathogens or things like early blight and late blight. Voles I am not sure about. I mean has anything about voles. But I understand what people are thinking. I tend to get voles more so in my lawn and in my garden. One of my colleagues this morning was just complaining about deer eating his potatoes last year. And so he didn't get any tubers because they just mowed the vines right off. So the last question and just so everyone knows we will look up some information for you and post it with the recording as far as those different questions we haven't had a chance to get to. And it goes way back. It was the first question that came in. You mentioned that potatoes came to East Coast from Europe. Would it be fair to say there was a detour from the Andes to Europe to the East Coast? That is the exact scenario that happened. The Spanish conquistadors brought potatoes from South America to Europe and then when people came to the U.S. partly because of things like the Irish potato famine they brought potatoes because potatoes that were high in vitamin C they prevented scurvy. But they also didn't know what they were going to find here. So they brought potatoes along. So I will draw us to a close. That was a great presentation Susie. And I look forward to us getting back together and working on that pocket guide. Just so everyone knows Scott just posted the NDSU potato web page in the chat. So you can take a look at that. But we'll also put a link to that with our field of fork archive of this presentation along with your certificate. So thank you so much. This has been really fun to learn more and I appreciate your time and I appreciate everyone for being here. Thanks everyone.