Final report: Improved Protein Bait Formulations for Fruit Fly Control
11 November 2003Integrated Viral Disease Management in Vegetable Crops
24 August 2012Potatoes are the fourth largest food crop internationally and are easily the largest vegetable crop in Australia accounting for 20% of all vegetable production. The Australian industry produces about 1.3m tonnes of potatoes and out of these produced annually, the market is split into processing, fresh and seed potatoes in the following way. Processing potatoes 56%, fresh 36% and seed potatoes 8%. These major market segments each require separate combinations of quality traits that need to be reflected in breeding objectives along with production traits that are important for growers. Thus an Australian breeding program was required to breed new cultivars for Australian conditions and priorities. The disease resistance screening work in the program has illustrated the importance of this, as internationally recognised resistant cultivars can be susceptible to disease when screened against Australian strains of the disease. This is a final report on the National Potato Breeding Program, which operated under a new model since July 2003. This model involved industry groups and companies identifying the program priorities. The program then conducted the early generation screening before providing advanced selections to these groups/companies for evaluation.