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Yesterday was another successful field day at the Hancock Agricultural Research Station.  As usual, we dug up tubers of our advanced breeding lines to show the crowd.  The display caught the attention of a local news team, which led to some good publicity for the breeding program and two new UW varieties: Red Endeavor and…

One of the key developments in plant breeding in the last 20 years has been the use of molecular markers to select for genetic traits in segregating populations.  Disease resistance is perhaps the prime example of a trait amenable to marker-assisted selection.  Thanks to the diligent work of Grace Christensen (research specialist for the breeding program),…

On Monday we harvested our last field trial at the Hancock Research Station, marking the end of the 2014 field season for the breeding program.  One of the key changes we made this year was to group all Year 4+ breeding lines from the same market category into a single trial, rather than evaluating the Year 4 and…

On July 18 there was a field day at the Rhinelander Research Station to showcase the work of the potato breeding program and other research taking place there: A few days later we participated in the potato field day at the Hancock Research Station to tell growers about our new varieties:

Several weeks are spent each summer cross-pollinating our best breeding lines to generate tens of thousands of true seeds that are genetically distinct.  Here is a photo of Lance and Grace removing the anthers from collected flowers: After drying overnight, the anthers are shaken and shed pollen that is collected in tubes.  The true seeds are inside…

Two weeks ago we broke new ground at UW-Madison by performing quality testing for French fries.  This grew out of our participation in a nationwide effort to develop new varieties for the French fry market with lower acrylamide, which is a suspected carcinogen that forms when potatoes (and other starchy foods) are fried.  It turns…