In a world where balancing food production with environmental sustainability is increasingly essential, potatoes stand out as both an exemplary and a challenging crop.

As a staple food in Scotland, potatoes offer significant nutritional and caloric benefits, producing more calories per hectare than any other Scottish crop (15.6 million calories per hectare). They are rich in essential nutrients, including amino acids, potassium, calcium, and vitamin C, making them a versatile and vital food source.

However, production is not without its hurdles. Potato cultivation often requires intensive inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides to combat threats like potato late blight and maintain high yields. Additionally, extensive soil tillage necessary for potato farming can be energy intensive and detrimental to soil health.

Regenerative agriculture, which aims to reduce environmental impacts while maintaining productivity, is gaining traction. While some principles of regenerative farming, like reduced tillage and minimal input use, are challenging to implement in potato production, innovation in this area is promising. Growers are already adopting new practices to balance environmental sustainability with crop yield.

One approach is Integrated Pest Management (IPM), which balances production needs with environmental protection. IPM strategies include diverse crop rotations that reduce the rate of pests, weeds, and diseases. For example, extending potato rotations to six to eight years, compared to shorter historical rotations, helps mitigate pest problems and benefits other crops in the rotation. Utilising high-health seed schemes and resistant potato varieties, along with alternatives to conventional pesticides, are common methods to reduce pesticide reliance.

Advances in laboratory testing for soil and seed health allow growers to make informed decisions about planting locations and varieties based on specific pest and disease risks. Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) offers a powdery scab test, among other services, helping growers choose the best fields and potato varieties for planting based on soil and seed conditions.

SRUC and its partners have developed metrics to quantify the uptake of these IPM measures, providing potato growers with annual IPM plans to aid their planning.

Emerging solutions to specific production challenges mark an exciting development. Aphid-vectored viruses, a major cause of yield and quality loss, drive significant pesticide use. More accurate risk prediction models and innovative solutions like food-safe coloured dyes that confuse aphids are being researched. Additionally, applying straw mulch and co-planting with other crops can reduce aphid spread.

Efforts to minimise soil disturbance are underway, with some growers exploring reduced tillage practices to form drills with minimal disturbance. Reducing standard destoning depths is another practice being investigated. The use of biological products containing bacteria, fungi, or nematodes that target harmful soil microorganisms is also on the rise. SAC’s potato team is researching biostimulants, some of which are biologicals, that claim to reduce the need for nitrogen-rich fertilisers.

A holistic approach to these innovations is essential to avoid unintended consequences, and risks should be shared along the supply chain, not left solely to growers. For instance, while there is pressure to ban many fungicides, planned use of multisite fungicides in late blight protection programmes can reduce the risk of novel blight strains and preserve more environmentally friendly fungicides' efficacy.

Regenerative practices should not signal a return to low yield systems of the past but should embrace new innovations as they emerge. Sustainability must be a shared goal across the supply chain to ensure that growers' efforts are not undermined by other sectors.

For more information on how our expert teams are working in this space, visit sac.co.uk/potatoes.