The Ministry of Agriculture has harvested the Red Pontiac potato variety from the seed plot that was planted at the Sigatoka Research Station.
The Ministry’s Senior Research officer Amena Banuve said that the seed plot was planted in June this year adding that the Red Pontiac takes three months to mature.
“As we are on the harvesting stage, our next step is to take all these Red Pontiac seeds to be stored in a diffuse house and cooler before the next planting season.”
He said that these potatoes will be ready for planting in January during the off season and are to be harvested in April next year for the main season of planting.
“This is not a new variety since it was grown by our local farmer’s way back in the 1970s-80s and currently we managed to buy some seeds from Australia for farmers to grow.
“This is a high yielding variety and adapts well to the local climatic conditions,” he said.
Mr Banuve said that the Ministry is trying to produce their own Red Pontiac seeds instead of importing it from New Zealand and Australia.
This is an on-going research activity with the primary objective of producing our own potato seeds in Fiji.
Red Pontiac is for seed production while other three new varieties from Australia are Sebago, Atlantic and Golden delight are still on the ground for further trials. The tissue cultured material is provided by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) and is also included in this varietal evaluation.
Currently, the Research Division introduced another 42 tissue cultured varieties from Peru which are still under propagation at the tissue culture laboratory in Koronivia. Once more planting materials from this tissue cultured varieties are available, they will undergo a hardening process before field trials will be conducted.