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Hydroponic Potatoes: The Future of Tuber Cultivation? · Hydroponics Daily

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Hello and welcome back to Hydroponics Daily, the podcast for everything soilless cultivation.
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I'm your host, Dr. Russell Sharp, and one of my targets for this podcast is
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to get listeners in every single country in the world and every single state in the US.
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And so I'm going to target two specific states today that I think will be interested
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in the topic we're going to talk about, and that is, can you grow potatoes hydroponically?
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And I want to target obviously idaho
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the world center for potato
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production is idaho that's where all the potatoes
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for mcdonald's are grown if you don't know
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this the mcdonald's variety is called the russet burbank
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not the russell burbank the russet burbank the
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russet because it has like this mottling on its
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skin and so obviously if i've got no listeners
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in idaho then if i can't get them in your list is on potatoes
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and i might as well give up i've got an american guy who
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lives in my village and he reliably informs me that one of the signs that
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welcomes you into what idaho says great potatoes
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good people and the fact that they put the potatoes
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before their people is says everything about idaho it's grown
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they're grown in idaho because the i think it's high elevation.
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So the aphids can't spread disease as well it's
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the same reason why seed potatoes are grown in northern scotland
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because it's cold it's very windy and high and
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and so the the aphids can't spread the virus potatoes what
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we call wear potatoes the potatoes you eat from the
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supermarket they're not grown in scotland it's only
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the sea potatoes they're grown in england or in
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belgium most of the the french fries
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in europe are actually grown in belgium top fact
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most of the frozen vegetables in in well belgium
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is the number one producer of frozen vegetables in europe and
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so scotland in scotland potato production
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is classed as horticulture because it's high value
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whereas in england it's considered agriculture that's an interesting useless
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fact for you i also want to target north dakota because i've got no listeners
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in north or south dakota and north is the third largest potato producer in North
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America behind Washington State.
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Interestingly, North Dakota has got loads of potato production,
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but South Dakota has got zero potato production it says.
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So I want to focus on those places.
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You might think Ireland for potatoes. Everyone thinks and associates Ireland
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with potatoes, but actually they grow very few potatoes in Ireland.
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They eat lots of potatoes in Ireland, and it's part of their national cuisine.
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So they grow potatoes. And obviously Ireland is associated with the Great Famine
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in the mid to late 19th century, and that was exacerbated or caused by,
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depending on your opinion.
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By potato blight phytophora infestans
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and it obviously led to
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mass problem of potatoes this is not very hydroponics
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but it is very interesting so i'm just going to go on about it for ages
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because obviously the british were in ireland and treated
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the irish population very poorly to say the least and the
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irish population potatoes grew very well in
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ireland but it was obviously very wet and so
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when when the potato blight the fung not
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fungal but the water mold disease came in it thrived
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really well and the problem was the way
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the agriculture was set up in ireland the cereal
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crops were grown for the landowners the rich english landowners they
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were exported and the the general population
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the irish population they survived on potatoes to a
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massive degree like the amount of their calories that came
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from potatoes was crazy high and a
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lot of the alcohol production came from potatoes and so then
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this disease wiped out the that then
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there was a lot of starvation and famine
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and people had to emigrate from Ireland
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to the UK and to the US and other places around the world and this disease also
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wiped out all the potatoes in England as well so there was a lot there was famine
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in England as well at the same time but not to the extent it's so dramatic that
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if you look at the population of ireland it's.
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The only population of any country where it was higher in
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the 19th century than it is now i think it's a
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crazy amount of people that were lost from ireland and obviously the impact
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that has on the the country in general and phytoffer
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infestans potato blight has had other massive effects
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around the world it's thought it was
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the contributing factor one of the contributing factors to germany
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losing the first world war because they stored all their
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weapons in the dry potato stores and then they stored all their potatoes in
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schools basements and places like this and and churches and so they wiped their
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entire potato crop was wiped out and so they had nothing to feed their soldiers
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an army marches on its stomach and so.
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The Germans just starved themselves out of World War I.
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Now why is that important? It shows you the importance
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of pest and disease control in potato cultivation and
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that's why a lot of people are looking at it for hydroponics because you can
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remove the soil from the system and if you grow them indoors then you're not
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having moist wet foliage because it's not getting rained on and if you grow
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a potato crop to this day you're spray in the field you're spraying the potatoes.
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Probably fortnightly in peak periods of blights
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you know danger with fungicides and
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other products that you want to prevent them from causing potato
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blight so it's a it's a massive issue so you can grow them hydroponically there's
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there's a massive potential the problem with potatoes is they're
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not a sexy crop they're not
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an expensive crop and so compare that to
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strawberries where everyone's chasing the pound signs
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they've got pound signs in their eyes with potatoes that's not so much the case
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so there is options for potatoes and when it comes to potatoes a lot of people
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are looking at seed potato production the expensive young potatoes that can
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be then used for propagation in the field sort of hybrid system you're not producing
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the edible crop you're producing the seed production.
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And hydroponics lends itself well to that. You can produce seed potatoes aeroponically,
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so you can have a completely grown media free system.
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And that's good because you don't have to be messing around with the grown media.
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You don't have to remove a potato from a rock wall. I would imagine that would be near on impossible.
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And you don't need to clean the potato. And that's crucial because that's what
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a lot of water goes into potato production.
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If you could produce potatoes hydroponically, the edible type,
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then you would want to do it from the water side of things.
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When you look on the internet and you see hydroponic potato production for edible
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crops, it's normally in Asia, India, and that's where water would be limited.
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That's where the real advantage of hydroponics comes in for potatoes.
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As well as disease control. If you think about a hydropodic system can reduce
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the water use by 95%. In potatoes, they use a vast amount of water in their
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production, but most of that water goes in preventing scab.
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So they just irrigate and irrigate and irrigate the fields to prevent this scab
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disease that causes an unsightly blemish on the potato. It's got nothing to do with yield.
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And that's one reason they use loads of water. The other
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reason they use loads of water is just cleaning the potatoes they put
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these vast amounts of water cleaning potatoes to get
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the soil off them and then when you get potatoes home you then
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clean the potatoes again to get the water off so if you can grow them hydroponically
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then that would be fantastic so two really good reasons to grow them hydroponically
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reduce reduction water use and disease control so as i say at the moment the
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only commercial systems i've seen are for seed production.
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When we say seed it's in inverted commas they're not actually seeds
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they're just young propagules of the tubers that are
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disease free that you use to grow them they're not actually seeds
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they don't go from a fruit if your potatoes actually do
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fruit and produce seeds then you've grown them too long because you should have
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harvested them before that you harvest them when they flower and the tubers
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from down below if you don't know potato tubers are not a root they're a stem
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and you can tell that because they've got buds on them anything with buds on in a plant is a stem.
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And so the eyes of potato are the buds.
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And you can also tell it's a stem because if you put them in the light,
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then they go green. And that's one of the major challenges of hydroponics.
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Obviously, you need to keep the root system extremely free of light,
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not only to prevent algae growth, but in this case also to prevent the potatoes,
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the tubers from going green if you want to eat them.
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If you get a green potato, it's going to cause you significant stomach upsets,
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gastrointestinal problems, and.
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They contain teratogenic compounds. So if you don't know, teratogens are compounds
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that mutate sperm and eggs, gametes.
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And so you definitely want to avoid green potatoes, green crisps,
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green chips, if you want to have babies.
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In America, you call French fries, yes, green French fries, fries.
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We call them chips, but you call crisps chips.
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So it all gets very confusing but you want to avoid anything of those things
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if they're green freedom fries yeah we've just bombed iran we'll have to the
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french will get annoyed and we'll start calling french fries freedom fries again
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won't we so where was i hydroponic potatoes before i got political there.
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Was a fairly recent report from norway that
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was published in a fairly good journal not so
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fairly good journal a good journal and that showed that hydroponic potatoes
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you could get 200 to 300 percent year high yield growing
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them in wood fiber than you could in field grown potatoes however
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it was a norwegian study so the limit of that
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is that norway is not great for agriculture it's not
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a big production for agriculture the norwegians will admit to this and it's
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not one of their big boasts having a massive agricultural system so whether
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they could you could get 200 300 high yields than say lincolnshire idaho or
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belgium i would be interesting to know how that compares,
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but they did have very good yields.
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The problem with high dependent potatoes is they can become misshapen, and so.
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Because they haven't got any medium to butt up against and things like this so
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can you get produce a really good reliable consistent crop
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and where the tuber size is ideal for
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what supermarkets are after or processors so
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you will see youtube videos of i think it was an indian company that were growing
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them for crisp production or potato chips and they're producing these tiny you'll
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see this on the youtube video they're producing these tiny tiny tubers and then
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they're saying that we send these off to the processor to produce potato chips.
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But the chips coming out of the machine were much, much larger than the tubers
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they were harvesting by hand as well.
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And that's another issue. If you need to harvest by hand, then potatoes is not going to be economic.
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The vast majority of potatoes worldwide are harvested with a machine.
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And so you wouldn't need to do that if you're going to produce hydroponic potatoes.
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There would need to be a system where you could harvest them without
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just by hand but there are lots of systems now
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for harvesting lots of hydroponic crops
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with robotics so it's not beyond the you know
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the capacity of hydroponic engineers to
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produce a robot for potato harvesting in hydroponic systems
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in california there are a couple of companies
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who have looked at nft systems nutrient film
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techniques for growing hydroponic potatoes south
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el monte hydroponics in california they use
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nft to grow sea potatoes with less disease and
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higher turnover css farms again another
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californian based operation and they use
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technology derived from nasa and nasa
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have looked at using hydroponics to grow potatoes because it's a stable food
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the great thing about potatoes is you don't need to you don't need a flower
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you don't need pollination you don't need to complete the plant's life cycle
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another great thing about potatoes from a feed the world and feed astronauts perspective is that.
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The amount of calories that go back into the propagation material
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is very low and so you compare
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that to other tuber crops like yams i've looked at things like chinese
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yams in the past and african yams and like 30
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percent of the actual calories that you harvest have
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to go back in for the next crop you have to put a very very
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big tuber back in and that's not good from.
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A you know you want that you want to be able to harvest and grow again with
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not much going back in so you know like a wheat plant it's
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only one seed that's going back in and so
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that's good from a tuber perspective and just gross calories in perspective
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and there's not much processing that goes on you don't
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need to grind and what else
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do you do with flour you know sort the wheat from the chaff
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potato you just you can just put throw it
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in water a bit of washing with pure water and
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then just boil it up so you could you could
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grow that obviously the martian on the the
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book that became the film with matt
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diamond that that was all based on
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potatoes wasn't it lots of potatoes in that book and they
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used there he was saying that scientists
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said that you must have beneficial microbes because
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the potatoes wouldn't grow without them i'm not sure how true
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that is yes potatoes would benefit from having beneficial
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microbes especially for resisting pest disease and environmental
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stress i think they could you could get away with growing one
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in martian dust hydroponically sometimes you
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had hydroponic fertilizer volcanic rock should
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be fine might need a bit of rinsing a few times and
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pulverizing but it should be fine i think
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one of the issues with aeroponic potatoes is that yes you
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can produce seed potatoes on on the roots that dangle in
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the mist but once you get
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to large potatoes that weigh maybe 100 grams
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the potatoes will start to fall off the.
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The plant so that's going to be one of the issues you're
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going to need some sort of matrix for
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them to hold on to so that's that i've
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talked about the russet burbank said that strawberries at
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the moment strawberries are the crop that everyone's after because they are
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more high value and you know you can grow strawberries for christmas then you
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can make a lot of money the another interest in potatoes though is we talked
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about the water use and if you know disease control water use another potential
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big win for hydroponic potatoes,
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is if you can bio fortify the potato then you could be big wins for the potato
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industry and that's i don't know about in other countries but in the uk there's
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this big thing about five day.
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You have to have five fruits or vegetables a day.
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And potatoes don't count as a fruit or vegetable in the UK.
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They don't count as a vegetable because they're just considered calorific.
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There's no significant nutritional value.
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So the Department for Health don't consider potato to be a vegetable in the
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sense that it contributes to your five a day that you need for a healthy lifestyle.
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But if you can increase the iron content or the zinc content of a potato or
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some other micronutrient or some phytocytical, then like vitamin C and things like this,
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then you could potentially persuade the Department of Health that it is a vegetable.
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And there's been a lot of interest in this, a lot of sort of nano fertilizers,
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you know, people who've been working on nano fertilizers, foot fertilizers,
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and Nottingham Trent University, Gareth Cave.
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And they're they've looked at increasing the iron
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content of potatoes and try and get them persuaded the
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department that it's classed as a potato as a
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vegetable so big wins for the potato industry
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if they can suddenly class that because then things like jacket potatoes
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roast potatoes maybe not
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chips crisp and french fries and potato
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chips because they're they're unhealthy because the oil content
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that goes with them but you know there's lots of potential there for
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the potato to get people more eating more potatoes and this
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week in the uk there was a big news story
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big news story that's an exaggeration you go
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to hawknews.com they were saying that there's a big glut of potatoes in the
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uk because no one's eating potatoes anymore we're all on pasta and rice and
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things like this as we diversify our diets so they're trying to encourage people
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to eat more potatoes so yeah so if we can class them as a vegetable people will
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say oh let's eat some healthy potatoes.
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Let's see. One of the problems of research in hydroponic potatoes is there's
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lots of websites that claim that potatoes are grown hydroponically commercially,
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but I doubt whether they actually are.
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I think it's mainly these sort of seed potatoes, small potatoes.
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I don't know of anyone producing ware potatoes or processing potatoes on a large scale hydroponically.
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I just don't think it's there. I think I would have seen this happening.
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I would have seen machinery that's designed for it and i
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don't i can't see it happening anytime soon because of the price of
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them if it does happen i think what will
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happen is that it won't be like really large
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potatoes it'll be what we
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call in the uk new potatoes the the
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young small potatoes that you put in a
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potato salad or jersey potatoes we
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call them as well they're seasonal and if you could grow new potatoes or jersey
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potatoes for christmas then or salad potatoes for christmas then that's going
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to be your most expensive you know it's going to be the range rover of the potatoes
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your baking potatoes your roasting potatoes your,
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these are not going to be the ones that are going to be grown hydroponically
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first or if ever i just think they're going to be the ones and then maybe things
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like maybe there's a there's a black potato you know really dark purple pigmented
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potato that grows you could grow hydroponically.
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That you couldn't grow in the field or struggles to grow in the field and you
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know you speak to a potato breed and there might be one that really they'd love
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to commercialize but they can't and,
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because it doesn't grow well then maybe that's the sort of thing that would
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you could choose rather than saying we want to grow hydroponically potatoes
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which one should we grow maybe speak to the breeder first and say what can't
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you grow in the field that would be what i would do,
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rather than that way around it might be there's some sort of you know gm superfood
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potato or something like that that's really valuable and so you don't want to
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risk putting it into the field Other things with potatoes is they can get viruses,
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so you can keep the aphids, the green fly out.
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There's another reason to grow them in protected environments and protect them from viral diseases.
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Obviously, if you're keeping them indoors, you're going to protect them from
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blight. If you get potato blight indoors, you've done something seriously wrong
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because the foliage should be dry and you should be able to control the humidity.
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If you haven't done that, then you shouldn't be growing potatoes hydroponically.
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As I say, I've tried it before in the past to try and grow the world's largest potato.
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With disastrous consequences because i just produced 600 tiny
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little potatoes rather than one giant one so i'm no one
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to talk when it comes to optimizing hydroponic potatoes i'm more
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than happy to be steered if you know somebody who's grown
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hydroponically potatoes or any especially
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anyone commercially i'd love to hear about it and do a
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follow-up episode on it as i said there are a lot of companies doing
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seed potatoes an interesting one is a company in
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finland and they're growing one in an
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abandoned metal mine i'm assuming that's metal ore and the website is absolutely
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bonkers the uh the finnish town is unpronounceable it's got lots of umlauts
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and things like that in it so i'm not going to even attempt it the mine is at a depth of 1,444 meters.
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1 400 is that right is that
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right that's bonkers how do you get
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the potatoes from that depth it must cost a
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fortune to get the seed potatoes up from that depth but yeah
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they're planning it must be very warm down there that's
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gonna say i guess that's why they're growing them there's no aphids down
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there you can get a stable environment i suppose and they'll
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grow well under the controlled conditions at that depth the
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temperature of the mine is between 18 and 20 degrees
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c so is geothermal and they're going to use led
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lights that's mad you you you would
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need a lot of bunker busting bombs to stop
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that farm from producing sea potatoes because bunker
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busters is what they go down to 600 so we
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all know now now the u.s is trapped around that they
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go down to 60 to 100 meters and this one is
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at least 14 times maybe
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20 times that depth that is crazy so yeah
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i just don't think it just
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seems bonkers that i mean we have in the uk we had a company called
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was it growing underground something like that my
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mind's gone and that was growing in underground abandoned railway underground
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tube tube lines that doesn't exist anymore and i guess there just wasn't the
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capacity or just didn't make feasible sense to grow in the underground system
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who knows why that company failed i have no idea.