Manhattan, Montana -- Even after 17 years as director of the Potato Laboratory at Montana State University, Mike Sun isn’t all that crazy about potatoes. Born and raised in Taiwan, he prefers rice.
That hasn’t hurt his popularity in the Gallatin Valley, where potato growing has flourished since World War II. To the close-knit Dutch-American farm families here, Mr. Sun is more than an agricultural expert and a friend. He is the person many of them credit for making Montana nationally known for prolific, disease-free “seed potatoes.”
The reputation sustains their livelihood and their way of life. “Our farm is worth a lot more for development than it is for farming,” says Bill Kimm, who, like his father and father- in-law, grows seed potatoes. Yet he wants to keep farming. “It is a wonderful way to raise a family.”
The testing and research that Mr. Sun introduced to the Potato Lab is critical because it helps to insure that the Montana farmers can prosper, says Mr. Kimm, driving past rows of blooming potato plants that began as three-inch seedlings in the sterile lab.
Seed potatoes are carefully cultivated tubers that are prized for their purity. They are what commercial growers plant to develop their crop.
Montana sells about $27-million worth of seed potatoes a year -- a sliver of the state’s $2-billion agricultural economy, but a mainstay of this valley -- 30 miles southwest of Montana State -- and of a smaller farming region to the north.
Some farmers, like Mr. Kimm, specialize in growing seed potatoes from the seedling stage. The potatoes are then cut up, and each piece with an eye is used as “seed” for a new plant. Other seed-potato farmers start with the cut-up, second-generation potatoes. Once the plants reach the fourth generation, they are sold to large-scale farms in Idaho, Washington, and other states with lon growing seasons.
Montana ships about five million 100-pound sacks a year, and the origin of every potato in those sacks can be traced to seedlings in hundreds of tiny jars in a 70-degree room in the Potato Lab at the Plant Growth Center on Montana State’s campus in Bozeman.
Farmers in Montana grow 23 varieties of potatoes. For seed potatoes to be certified, they must have originated from seedlings that have been grown and tested by the lab.
Montana State has tested and certified potatoes since 1952. Farmers say the quality control has improved immensely since Mr. Sun introduced a regimen that includes the same kind of procedure used to test for H.I.V. and other viruses.
“Back in ’78, nobody was using it. But now everybody is using it,” says Mr. Sun. Known as ELISA, for Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay, the test checks for reactions in plant tissue exposed to antibodies for six common potato viruses.
The lab tests potato-plant leaves that inspectors collect from marked fields during the summer, and the meristems, or growing tips, of the seedlings that farmers plan to sow.
By testing the meristems and then developing seedlings only from those found free of disease, Montana roots out diseases before they recur in later generations of plants. Since 1980, yields in the state have increased by 25 per cent.
“There are a lot of states that grow and market certified seed,” says Robert E. Thornton, an extension horticulturist at Washington State University and a technical adviser to Spudman, a potato-industry magazine. Montana’s are “as good as or better than any other sources we have.”
The budget for testing and other lab ventures comes largely from the Montana Potato Improvement Association, a 70-farm consortium.
Embarrassed in the mid 1970s by diseased crops that came from lab-certified seed -- and later by a lawsuit that resulted in a judgment of nearly $500,000 against it -- the association sought out Mr. Sun for his expertise in plant virology.
He received his doctorate from North Carolina State University in 1971 and worked at an agricultural-research center in Taiwan and at the University of Michigan. He had worked on tobacco, tomatoes, cabbage, and beans, but not potatoes.
Now potatoes have become a family affair. His wife, Anna, has for the past five years worked part-time in marketing for the association. The couple frequently visits farms. Even after 17 years, Mr. Sun relishes inspecting a field in person.
Recently he visited with John N. Schutter, the patriarch of a farming dynasty that includes his five sons. Walking down a row of plants, Mr. Sun dug up one and admired the uniformity of potatoes the size of Ping-Pong balls. He inspected the leaves, which sometimes show signs of disease. These didn’t. Planted in mid-May, the potatoes will be ready to harvest by October.
Montana potato plants start out pure, but they become vulnerable to disease once they are planted.
With support from the potato association and the Monsanto Corporation, the Potato Lab has experimented with genetically engineered potatoes that might be resistant to disease. It spent five years and about $300,000 on the research but put it on hold two years ago because the university lacked the money to continue.
Now the lab is testing the use of fungi and other natural substances to combat disease. “It costs a lot less and it achieves the same goal,” says Mr. Sun.
Despite the success with potatoes here, it’s still Idaho, not Montana, that is famous for them.
The explanation is simple, says Mr. Schutter, who came to Montana in 1946 and continues a potato-farming tradition begun by his family in the Netherlands.
“They’re good advertisers,” he says. But he’s not complaining. Those commercial farmers also are good customers.