B-hive Innovations might just be one of the most futuristic companies in Britain. On a weekday afternoon, I find a mood of intense focus among the scientists, young men and women tapping at screens filled with inscrutable figures. The managing director, Vidyanath Gururajan, is taking me from desk to desk introducing his head of machine-learning, saying hello to his signal-processing guy, dropping terms like ‘military-grade ultrasonics’ and ‘tetraploid chromosomes’ and ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats’.
If it weren’t for the potato-shaped stress toys on each desk, I might assume that this is all to prepare us for some terrifying 21st-century form of mecha-biological warfare. In fact, these men and women are here to save us from a more unimaginable fate. They are here to save us from a future without potatoes.
‘The thing I’m proudest of is building this team,’ says Gururajan. ‘They have come into agricultural tech for good. They could use their skills for anything, but they’ve chosen to come into food because they believe they can make a difference.’
Their work is of national importance. In March, the Government-backed UK Research and Innovation fund invested part of its £13.5 million budget into this project, known as ‘TuberGene’. The money will enable scientists to apply cutting-edge precision breeding approaches to potatoes, to reduce bruising and make potatoes quicker to cook, to reduce waste and, ultimately, to transform them.
We are in the Potatopolis of Lincoln, which is to the chip what Silicon Valley is to the microchip. Lincolnshire remains top agricultural land, its flat landscape and rich soil ideally suited for growing potatoes. The nation’s largest potato buyer, Branston, which processes 385,000 tons of potatoes per year, is based nearby. B-hive is part of its R&D arm.
For a young scientist, fresh out of university, it is an exciting place to be. The mission is compelling, original, even noble. ‘Potatoes are a nutritionally complete foodstuff consumed by 1.3 billion people globally,’ Edward Richards, a bioinformatics scientist, tells me. ‘A large number of people could be aided through the use of bioinformatics to improve staple crops like potatoes. The human genome is intensely studied, having been sequenced almost half a million times to date. Plant genomes are not as well studied.’
His task is to sequence the genome of the Maris Piper, the nation’s most popular potato (accounting for 14 per cent of all potato crops), but also its most confounding. Compared to a mere human, a Maris Piper is a genetic enigma. While humans only have two copies of each chromosome, with one per cent variation, a Maris Piper has four, with gene variation as much as 40 per cent, so, as Richards says: ‘You can have four different expressions of the same quality.’ It sounds complicated, I remark. ‘All potatoes are intensely complicated,’ he replies.
Spend some time with potato people and two things become apparent. The first is a deep, near-mystical love of potatoes. Earlier in the day, I stood in a potato field with Gururajan, looking out over 30 acres of potato plants. Gururajan picked up a plant, buried his nose into the muddy roots and gave it a sniff. ‘That’s why it’s so hard to get out of agriculture,’ he said, offering me the bouquet. It was fresh and green and compelling – enough to make me wonder if I too should get into potatoes.
Also present was Jim Windle, CEO of Branston. His career started at business services company KPMG, but on a trip to Lincolnshire to audit Branston, he fell in love. ‘I went from being deeply rude about potatoes to being blown away by the business,’ he tells me. These days, he can talk about potato proteins, potato supply chains, mashing facilities, ready-to-cook potential and make it sound like the most exciting thing in the world. ‘People always describe the potato as “humble”, but when you get into it, they are anything but.’
Which brings us on to the second trait of potato people – their concern that without technological innovation, the British potato will die out.
‘Whoever you ask in industry, they will say that the thing they need most are new varieties,’ says Ian Toth, director of the National Potato Innovation Centre in Dundee. ‘We can’t wait 30 years. We have to do it now.’
The potato is one of Britain’s most important crops and, according to YouGov, our favourite vegetable. Demand has proved resilient in part because potatoes are so versatile. You can boil, bake or roast them. You can also process them in chips, crisps or hashbrowns or ‘ready to cook’ packages, whether prepared mash, or ready-chopped parmentier.
And yet the long-term trend is decline. ‘In the 1970s, we were 100 per cent self-sufficient in production,’ says Toth. ‘Now in 2024 we’re only 65 per cent and falling. We may reach a time in the not-too-distant future when it’s no longer viable for industry to produce potatoes. And then we will have a big crisis.’
The fears of a potatoless future may sound alarmist. ‘If you like your Maris Pipers, I suggest you put them in a muddy bag and stick it in a dark garage,’ Dave Burks of AKP Potatoes said earlier this year, contemplating the third poor harvest in a row. Defra reports a 12 per cent reduction in the area of main crop potatoes in 2023. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) reckons we’re down about 20 per cent.
‘Potatoes are not in crisis yet,’ says Tim Rooke, third generation potato farmer and the NFU’s potato policy chair. ‘But it’s fair to say they’re in steady decline.’ He describes a ‘perfect storm’ of climate change, Brexit, Covid, global instability, short-sighted legislation – and over-reliance on old varieties such as the Maris Piper.
The problems faced by the potato are endemic across agriculture – but the potato is particularly vulnerable. The first and most acute challenge is the weather, which has been absolutely terrible. We’ve had the sort of wet and windy summer that makes you want to stay at home eating baked potatoes; ironically these are precisely the sort of conditions that do not produce good tatties. ‘We’ve had problems every year,’ says Kieran Hardy, who works with the Dutch company HZPC to develop new potatoes for the UK market. ‘Last year, we had this phenomenally wet period, which meant there was blight in the early crops. The year before, there was a phenomenal amount of heat and potatoes don’t cope well with heat stress. Then this year we had an unreal amount of rain in the planting period.’
One reason that potatoes are so sensitive to these fluctuations is that they spend a lot of time in the ground: typically potatoes are planted in April and harvested in October. That’s a long window for our increasingly erratic climate to do its worst. There are ways of mitigating these risks: pesticides and fungicides, for instance. But many of the most widely used sprays, such as Chlorothalonil, have been banned for environmental reasons. A modern irrigation system will help with drought and a state-of-the-art potato harvester can help harvest crops in the wettest autumns. But both of these cost money: about £1 million for a Grimme Varitron 470 Terra Trac, the Lamborghini of potato harvesters. It’s one reason smaller producers are getting out of potatoes. Windle tells me that of 2,500 farmers who were growing potatoes in 2020, only about half that number still do.
Tim Rooke of the NFU confirms this bleak picture. ‘It costs up to £2,500 to plant an acre of potatoes. On a good year, you will get 20 tons of potatoes and you can make a healthy profit, perhaps £400 or £500 profit per acre. In the last two years, yields have been 12 to 18 tons and anything less than 16 tons is a loss.’
And here’s another potato quirk. Once you’ve grown potatoes in a field, you cannot use that field for potatoes again for another six or seven years thanks to a teeny (0.039in) roundworm called the potato cyst nematode (PCN). Potato farmers rotate their crops with other vegetables, cereals, sugar beet, rape, etc, and often rent fields from other landowners to ensure their soils have safe levels of PCN. But many people are now taking advantage of post-Brexit subsidies that reward them for leaving their land fallow, says Rooke. ‘They’re saying, I’m planting this crop that’s going to cost me £2,500 per acre. What’s the point? I might as well put it down for rewilding and take the money because at the end of the day, it’s just work and risk.’
Added to this we have the Ukraine war, which has sent energy costs soaring. This affects potatoes more than most vegetables, since potatoes need to be stored for much of the year in refrigerators. Then there are post-Brexit trading arrangements that have had dire consequences for seed potatoes in particular, the tubers from which main crop potatoes are grown. One of the best places in Europe to grow high-quality seed potatoes is Scotland. But Scottish farmers are no longer allowed to sell their seed potatoes into the EU and British farmers can’t buy new seeds from the EU either. ‘Potato growers in Europe are desperate to get our high-grade Scottish seed, so much so that they continue to lobby the European Commission to change the rules,’ says Scott Walker of GB Potatoes. ‘It’s nothing to do with health or climate or anything like that. It’s just a political obstacle.’
What we need, everyone agrees, are new varieties – and fast. ‘We need innovation for drought-resistant potatoes, we need innovation for PCN, and we need innovation to counter the loss of crop protection products,’ says Rooke. ‘But since Brexit, farmers are stuck with the varieties that we have.’
It is worth remembering that the potato as we know it has evolved dramatically since it first arrived in Britain in the 16th century, initially imported for their pretty pink and purple flowers. Horror was the immediate reaction, with Toth noting that Elizabethans were at first reluctant to eat the roots. ‘They didn’t look anything like they do now. They’re described as being “fingerlike and black”.’ It was assumed that they contained leprosy.
The overarching vulnerability lies in the genetics of the potato itself. Much as there is only one surviving species of hominid – Homo sapiens – there is only one species of domesticated potato, Solanum tuberosum. Like us, the potato had a wild, quasi-Edenic prehistory. Potatoes originate in Peru and Bolivia (the word ‘potato’ comes from the native American Taíno language, ‘batata’). There, they grow wild and reproduce sexually. This means that the 150 or so species of wild potatoes are in constant evolution, introducing new genetic variations each generation to adapt to their environments. Domesticated potatoes, however, are reproduced asexually, via seed potato tubers. A Maris Piper from 2024 is a genetic replica of a Maris Piper from 1956, when it was first created at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge. The climate, the fungi, the pests, the viruses – all of these have adapted. The Maris Piper has stayed the same. It’s a bit like trying to fight a modern war in a Morris Minor.
And yet for Toth, the future of the potato lies in this deep potato past. He is the custodian of the Commonwealth Potato Collection, comprising over 90 different wild and early cultivated potato species collected in the 1920s and 1930s in Peru, Bolivia and Mexico – many of which are indeed fingerlike and black. It’s the largest genomic resource of its kind.
Potato breeding can be a slow process, taking 15 to 20 years and, traditionally, breeders have essentially made educated guesses. However, advances in genetics mean that not only can scientists map the potato’s DNA in greater detail, they can cross-breed with greater precision. ‘The first thing is to look within the Commonwealth Potato Collection and see if there are genes that can withstand late blight. Then it’s a process of moving genes through conventional breeding into a marketable variety,’ says Toth. It is extremely complicated splicing a wild potato (with its two chromosome copies) and a domesticated potato (with four). However, he adds: ‘Some of the new techniques allow us to convert one potato so it’s compatible with the other.’ Vertical farms and LED lights have also sped up the process, allowing thousands if not tens of thousands of plantlets to be grown at a time, known as ‘speed-breeding’.
These are precisely the sort of techniques that Gururajan is hoping to exploit at B-hive, taking advantage of the UK government’s Precision Breeding Act (2023), which legalised gene-editing with the aim of promoting food security and reducing pesticide use.
Gene-editing is not to be confused with genetic modification, Gururajan stresses. Genetic modification (which is only legal in the US) is a bit like taking a non-fiction book and adding in fictional sections. Gururajan likens gene-editing to editing a book, crossing out the odd word, ripping out the odd page, but leaving the whole intact.
‘The UK has been brilliant and we have adapted ahead of Europe,’ he says. ‘We are poised to become a leader in gene-editing. We got there first. We believe it’s a very important tool in order to mitigate climate change issues. It is so much quicker than conventional breeding.’ Among the Maris Piper genes that they are attempting to isolate in the B-hive office are genes that make potatoes less prone to bruising and cook faster.
‘For the consumer, the Maris Piper is very versatile,’ says Toth. ‘You can roast it, mash it, fry it – people like that because you only need one potato to do lots of different things. Growers like it, because there’s a good chance of getting a reasonable yield from it and they know how to grow it because they’ve been doing it so long.’ In sustainability terms, however, it’s not so great. ‘It’s greedy in terms of water and nutrition. And it’s not late-blight resistant, for instance.’ Late blight, the fungus that caused the 1845 Irish Potato Famine, can still strike. Things aren’t going to get that bad again, but it remains the fable that haunts all potato farmers. ‘We wouldn’t starve because we would have to import it and rely on other foodstuffs,’ says Toth. ‘But we’d have very little potato production. Potatoes certainly wouldn’t be a viable industry.’
You might ask: does this matter? Does Britain need to pay its own way in potatoes? Scott Walker of GB Potatoes believes that it does. ‘The UK imports 825,000 tons of frozen chips a year. That’s about four million tons of potatoes in terms of raw material. There’s no reason we can’t grow those potatoes here. We’d far rather reap the economic benefits than import from abroad.’
But if it’s cheaper to import, why not do it? ‘What we’re doing is choosing a cheaper option, but a less profitable one,’ he says. ‘It’s all lost growth.’ Despite the risks, there is a lot of money to be made in potatoes, he argues.
‘Potatoes are nutrient-rich. They’re good for food security. And there’s a huge variety in what you can actually do with them – so many opportunities to add value. But you can’t do it if you don’t grow the potatoes,’ he adds.
What makes all this feel a little poignant is that British people really love potatoes – indeed, loving potatoes might just be the one thing that unites us as a people. In an interview published in Areté magazine in 2007, Britain’s much-loved novelist Ian McEwan identified the term ‘peoria’ as one of his favourite words. Definition: the fear of not peeling enough potatoes. His recent novel, Lessons, even features a potato-peeling scene as a prelude to a seduction. And if you don’t think potatoes are sexy, I’d like to direct you to the potato mille-feuille served at Camille in Borough Market; or the Tuscan roast potatoes served at Brutto in Clerkenwell; or indeed, a bag of chips from Whiteheads fish bar in Hornsea, East Yorkshire. Even Jackie Onassis once followed a diet of caviar and baked potatoes.
Moreover, contrary to the anti-mash propaganda fed to us by the carb-deniers of Instagram, potatoes are extremely good for you, a nutritionally complete food – indeed, the only nutritionally complete crop. ‘The potato gives you the amino acids, the protein building blocks that you need to maintain your physical health,’ says Toth. ‘Cereals don’t have that capability. The potato can help us lessen our reliance on animal proteins, which is clearly something we’ll need to think about in the future.’
This, indeed, is one area where Branston hopes to innovate, by taking potatoes that are too small or weird for the average supermarket shopper and converting them into a food-grade plant-based protein that’s far more sustainable than, say, soy. ‘People who are vegans want to do good for the planet,’ says Gururajan. ‘But there are lots of food miles on vegan products and there’s also a chemistry box set on the ingredients. By using UK-grown crops in the UK manufacturing plants in a UK plant-based industry, then you have true sustainability.’ It improves the proposition for farmers too: if they can sell their entire crop, knobbly little potatoes and all, then suddenly growing potatoes becomes that bit more viable.
The chips are down. But it is clear the potato sector will not go down without a fight. At the National Potato Innovation Centre, Toth conjures a future of AI-controlled, tractor-mounted precision weed zappers that are less reliant on harmful chemicals; he outlines plans for potato-fibre clothing that is many times more sustainable than cotton; he raises the prospect of potato-based face creams for the cosmetic sector. This is before we’ve got on to single-estate crisps – or potatoes that bake in the time it takes to cook spaghetti. It is a wide-open field.
‘When you start working with potatoes, you do get completely immersed in it,’ says Kieran Hardy. ‘There’s just so much detail and depth in potatoes. You see them on the supermarket shelves and you might think, there’s not much interest there. But there’s so much going on behind closed doors. There’s so much potential – it’s just a very exciting place to be.’
The post Britain is heading towards potato armageddon – unless science can save us appeared first on The Telegraph.
