According to Anthony Kibe, principal investigator of a potato community action research project led by Uganda-based Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture, Kenya's average potato yield per hectare has the potential to 

increase to three times that amount with the use of disease-free seeds.

Since its inception in 2017, the forum's project in Kenya, one of 11 across Africa, has benefited approximately 5,000 smallholders. It provides farmers with quality seeds through a process known as tissue culture, which is the cultivation of plant tissues or organs in a laboratory or controlled environment on specially formulated nutrient solutions.

"Tissue culture is an excellent technique for rapid propagation of seed potato, providing high yielding disease-free planting materials," Kibe says.

Tissue culture generates plantlets, also known as apical root cuttings, and mini tubers (tiny potato seeds) that are clean and disease-free, according to Kibe, who adds that the technology accelerates material multiplication to facilitate distribution and large-scale planting.

Tissue culture technology is used in East Africa to produce disease-free and high-yielding fruits and vegetables, including bananas.

However, because of the costs and complexity of the technique, it is primarily used by large commercial farms, seed companies, and government research institutions for potatoes, adds Kibe, an associate professor of agronomy in Egerton University's crops, horticulture, and soils department.

This means that certified seeds are relatively expensive and out of reach of the estimated 800,000 smallholder farmers engaged in potato farming in Kenya.

As a result, only around four to five per cent of seed potato planted in Kenya are certified, according to the International Potato Center, a member of the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers.

"This is in contrast to leading global producers like the Netherlands... where 99 percent of farmers use certified seeds," Kibe explains.

He claims that despite its contribution to fighting hunger, potato is a low priority food crop in Kenya's agricultural research system, with maize, Kenya's main staple crop, receiving 78% of food crop research.

Richard Mbaria, who owns a four-acre farm in Nakuru County's Elburgon area, in the heart of Kenya's potato-producing highlands, says that access to potato seeds for smallholders like himself is difficult because commercial farms often sell in bulk.

"A farmer buying tissue culture seed potato would spend between three to six times more what they spend to plant conventional certified seeds,” Mbaria says. “This in turn favours large-scale farmers, leaving smallholders with their low-yielding seeds selected from the previous harvest.”

But Mbaria touts the benefits of apical cuttings. He tells SciDev.Net that 100 apical cuttings can produce as much as 100 kilograms of seed potato on average.

Kibe agrees, adding that new varieties produced by the technology have led to yields as high as 30 tonnes per hectare compared with up to ten tonnes per hectare for conventional seeds.

Mike Cherutich, a potato expert at the Agriculture Development Corporation’s seed potato centre, Molo in Nakuru, Kenya, says that although seed potato produced from tissue culture technology tends to be more expensive than traditionally certified tubers, the new technology ensures that the material planted is free of virus and other major disease such as bacterial wilt.

Read the full Article on Scidev