Food News: Sweetpotato Foundation Seed Tested in Commercial Operations

Health-conscious consumers have created increased demand for the tasty, versatile food causing the popularity of sweetpotato to increase in the United States.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, per capita consumption of the crop increased over 24% from 1998-2008 and the value of the U.S. sweetpotato crop in 2009 exceeded $400 million.
Production costs for sweetpotato crops are high, requiring that commercial growers optimize their production techniques and quality to keep up with consumer demand. Because sweetpotato is vegetatively propagated, viruses and mutations can accumulate readily, leading to plant decline. To maintain the integrity of commercial seed stock, sweetpotato foundation seed programs in the United States provide virus-tested foundation seed to commercial producers. 
To better understand how rapidly the foundation seed declines after integration into commercial operations and to determine if production location affects decline, researchers conducted a study to evaluate changes in seed quality among farms in the major sweetpotato production areas of Louisiana. The results appeared in HortTechnology. "Although preliminary evaluations indicated that low incidence of re-infection with viruses can occur during the production of foundation seed, little information was available to evaluate how rapidly seed productivity and quality declined on farms, where older generations of sweetpotato are also grown and could serve as sources of inoculum for reinfection of new seed.", explained Christopher Clark, a Louisiana State University faculty member and lead author of the study.