SCRI’s Director, Professor Peter Gregory, has predicted the development of a potato variety that would require little or no pesticide and herbicide spraying.

It would herald a major development in the drive to reduce chemical inputs in farming.

Speaking to the annual meeting of Ringlink, a large farm industry cooperative organisation, Professor Gregory said: “I think a possibility would be to develop a ‘no-spray’ potato. It should be perfectly possible within 10 to 15 years to produce a type of potato that needs absolutely minimal chemical inputs. That could be done using ALL of the technologies available to us. The potato is the ideal crop because we already know quite a number of the genes in wild relatives that are capable of controlling the diseases in cultivated potatoes.”

The potato is one of the most heavily sprayed crops. A typical annual crop will require a dozen sprayings to protect from blight and in addition insecticides, nematicides and herbicides.

Professor Gregory continued: “The ‘no spray’ potato ought to be the goal and the challenge. It would fit in with the environmental protection policies that we are all looking for. Public sector research could push this forward, almost certainly with some commercial support.

“We would want to know that the disease resistance that we introduced was durable and long term...and you would also want to know that it wasn’t having adverse environmental effects and the public sector research organisations have already shown that we can do this pretty well,” he said.

The SCRI Director’s address contained several other broad themes. He said that SCRI was playing a major role in conventional crop breeding for the commercial sector. The Institute was involved in potato breeding with eight main contracts and also in soft fruit and barley breeding and was taking on and training plant breeders. He pointed out that conventional breeding took a very long time. In the case of a recent blackcurrant variety, the process had taken 40 years.

SCRI was also pioneering the use of genetic markers which were being used increasingly in conventional breeding work. This process involves identifying genes or groups of genes that control resistance to diseases, or other useful attributes such as drought resistance, and finding means of identifying a marker to indicate if those useful genes were present in a plant during conventional breeding.

More information from:

Phil Taylor, Head of Communications, SCRI, Invergowrie, Dundee, DD2 5DA. Tel: 01382 560044 (direct line), Mobile: 07810 860 701 or

Lorraine Wakefield, Information and Online Service Officer, SCRI, Invergowrie, Dundee, DD2 5DA. Tel: 01382 560047 (direct line) or 562731 (switchboard).