Training Farmers on seed potatoes production at  Egerton University . 

My name is Enock Rugut. I am a second-year masters student at Egerton University located in Njoro, Kenya, where I am working on a degree in plant breeding.

I am working on clean potato seed production under the Community Action Research Project (CARP) under the supervision of Professor Anthony Kibe, the principal investigator. My research project thus involves different activities – including planning, land preparation, acquisition of inputs and management of harvest to post-harvest handling.

The other activities include seed multiplication at the greenhouse level using technologies such as hydroponics and aeroponics. We also use in vitro techniques to multiply seeds in the laboratory.

The other major undertaking is putting up modern storage structures and, here, I am involved in all aspects, from costing to planning and actual construction. Most important, however, is training farmers to follow good agricultural practices. This happens at the university farm or through farm visits since the university is in an agriculturally endowed area.

DLS a simple, effective technique

One of the things we are introducing and teaching farmers about is the diffuse light store (DLS) concept involving low-cost storage technology. It is simple and involves storing seed potatoes in layers of trays or shelves in natural indirect light, ensuring adequate ventilation.

It is easy to construct a DLS with locally available materials like wood, mud and plastics. The reason for storing seed potato in a DLS include encouraging stronger, coloured and firm sprouts of potato tuber, avoiding weight loss and quality loss of the seed potato, and allowing time for lot inspection and labelling into classes.

There are three main basic elements in the DLK: light, ventilation, and protection. The light should be indirect, but sufficient to ensure short, firm and coloured sprouts. Long, white sprouts cause easy and fast shrinkage of the tuber. In DLS, tubers are arranged in layers of up to about 7.5cm to ensure that each tuber receives sufficient diffused light.

Ventilation is the most important factor in the store to ensure efficient and sufficient airflow to maintain the temperature and relative humidity for the tubers to breathe and respire. A lot of heat encourages weak sprouts. To manage ventilation or temperature regulation, the walls are spaced at least 7.5cm apart to allow air circulation.

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Nairobi, Oct 11 2022 (IPS) - Until a few years ago, Kenyan potato farmer Richard Mbaria used to harvest just four tonnes of the crop from an acre of land thanks to poor quality seeds, combined with an attack on the crop by pests and diseases.

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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