Syngenta Thrive - 1Q/2013 - 17

ew snacks can match the flavorful crunch of the potato chip—and few people can resist eating more than one. By some estimates, Americans consume over 4.3 billion pounds of potato chips each year. A majority come from potatoes grown in the U.S., where soils and climate provide a solid foundation for growth—and where diseases, both old and new, provide ongoing challenges to crop yield and quality. The most recent disease to hit the country’s potato acreage threatens to wield a direct blow to the thriving processed potato market at large. Named after the thin striping it causes, zebra chip, once confined to Texas and other Southwestern potato-growing regions, is steadily spreading northward. The discovery in 2011 and again in 2012 of potato psyllids in southern Idaho carrying the bacterium that causes zebra chip—Candidatus Liberibacter solanacearum—confirms that the disease has now reached North America’s largest potato production area.

Problematic Pathogen “There are a lot of unknowns with this disease,” says Chris Clemens, Ph.D., agronomy service representative for Syngenta in Washington state. “But one thing is clear: We are dealing with something that has the potential to devastate the potato industry in the Pacific Northwest, and we don’t want it to spread.” Although there is no threat to human health, the dark marks zebra chip leaves behind on tubers renders the crop unmarketable. It causes other problems as well: Infested plants produce fewer tubers, and the tubers that are produced tend to sprout prematurely in storage. Yield losses also can occur—up to 87.2 percent in a 2010 trial by Joseph Munyaneza, Ph.D., an entomologist with the USDA at the Agricultural Research Service in Wapato, Wash. “At this time, no field west of the Mississippi River is safe from the possibility of a zebra chip outbreak,” says Munyaneza, who is credited with first linking psyllids to

4.3
billion pounds of potato chips are consumed each year in the U.S.
Opposite page: A potato chip made from a potato infected with zebra chip; this page: zebra chip-infected potatoes.

1Q/13 · thrive · 15

Syngenta Thrive - 1Q/2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Syngenta Thrive - 1Q/2013