R. Navarre – The Potato. Botany, Production and Uses (2015)

Автор: R. Navarre
Название книги: The Potato. Botany, Production and Uses
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Биологические науки
Страницы: 383
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Potatoes are a staple crop around the world. Covering all aspects of botany, production and uses, this book presents a comprehensive discussion of the most important topics for potato researchers and professionals. It assesses the latest research on plant growth such as tuber development, water use and seed production, covers all aspects of pest management and reviews postharvest issues such as storage, global markets, and of course, nutritional value and flavor.

Potatoes are the most important non-cereal in the world and are an important part of the diet of
over 1.5 billion people across the globe. Despite the continued expansion of the world population,
resources needed to grow food are limited. Also pressuring food production will be increased meat
and dairy consumption in countries with rising affluence, and competition with biofuels. Some estimate
that crop production must double by 2050 to meet needs (Ray et al., 2013). Potatoes yield
substantially more calories per acre than maize, wheat, rice, or soybean (Chapter 18), and produce
>50% more protein per unit of land area than wheat and approximately 80% more than rice. No
other food, not even soybeans, can match the potato for production of food, energy, and food value
per unit of land.
Aside from being highly land-use efficient, potatoes offer consumers a wide array of complex
carbohydrates, protein, vitamins, and phytonutrients. For these reasons, and others, many scientists
believe potatoes will have a key role in providing “food security”, which can be defined as “when
all people, at all times, have access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs
for an active and healthy life”. The definition specifies “nutritious food”, which potatoes are. A medium-
sized (~170 g) potato can supply an adult with close to half of their daily requirement of
vitamin C (Pennington and Wilkening, 1997). Potatoes are the third largest contributor of antioxidants
in the American diet (Chun et al., 2005), and high-antioxidant potatoes have been shown to
reduce inflammation and lower blood pressure in separate human feeding studies (Kaspar et al.,
2011; Vinson et al., 2012). A study of nutritional value concluded that potatoes and beans provided
the most nutrients per dollar out of 98 vegetables evaluated (Drewnowski and Rehm, 2013).
Affordability is a primary consideration for much of the planet’s population and is a key component
of food security.
A gradual increase in global potato production will help address future food supply and nutrition
issues, especially when combined with modern breeding techniques. The major focus of many
potato breeding programs is to improve yield and quality while using fewer production resources, like
water, fertilizer, and land, than current varieties. These programs are also focused on identifying varieties
with resistance to major diseases and insect pests in order to reduce the need for pesticides,
thereby maintaining or improving the health of the environment. Advances in marker-assisted selection,
gene mapping, and genomics have allowed breeders to identify desirable and undesirable
traits in new cultivars more quickly; improving the chances of finding superior varieties while reducing
the time it takes to get them to market. In conjunction with modern breeding efforts, the industry
is continuously improving production, storage, processing, and marketing operations to offer
consumers high-quality, nutritious potatoes year-round.
This book discusses many of the items above and explains the origin of the domesticated potato,
its uses, nutritional contributions, production, storage and markets, plant anatomy, physiology and
development, pest identification and management, and traditional and biotechnological cultivar development
techniques. By incorporating intensive literature review with the applied expertise of the
authors, this book was designed to educate and enlighten consumers, students, growers, industry
personnel, and the scientific community.