News on Potato Defects and Diseases from Wisconsin

Andy Diercks, a fourth-generation potato farmer from the small village of Coloma in central Wisconsin, is blunt about the difficult realities facing family-owned farms today.

The Colorado potato beetle has evolved resistance to more than 50 different kinds of insecticides, making the insect a 'super pest' that wreaks havoc on potatoes around the world.

Researchers in the WARF Accelerator program are using advanced imaging technology to detect late blight in potatoes, which famously led to the Irish potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century.

The National Potato Council (NPC) has named University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student Sofia Giron the winner of its annual $10,000 scholarship. Giron is a fourth-year grad student studying plant pathology.

Late blight has been confirmed in a potato field in central Wisconsin.

The Colorado potato beetle is notorious for its role in starting the pesticide industry - and for its ability to resist the insecticides developed to stop it. Now scientists have sequenced the beetle’s genome, probing its genes for clues to its surprising adaptability.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed two new measures involving the potato industry last Wednesday. One law makes use of certified seed potatoes mandatory, the other enforces a faster response to the presence of late blight

Years before that french fry landed on your plate, the plant that would eventually give rise to the spud your fry was cut from was sealed away deep in a secure-access building, growing slowly in a test tube inside a locked growth chamber.

Justin Clements, a fifth year doctoral student in the Molecular and Environmental Toxicology Center working in the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the recipient of the 2016-2017 NPC Academic Scholarship.

Researchers discovered that in a wild variety of potato (Solanum Microdontum) Calcium levels are about seven times higher than in a regular potato. They developed a molecular marker to facilitate the transfer of the high Calcium trait to newly bred potato varieties.

A new 'Focus on Potato' webcast titled “Managing Diseases with Biopesticides in Potato Production” helps growers, consultants, and other practitioners in the potato industry understand the basics of biopesticides and their use in the field.

A potato disease known as Late blight is threatening some Wisconsin potato fields, but growers are well aware and making strides to prevent it from spreading.

Wisconsin River Co-op recently announced that it has purchased Pest Pros Inc., an independent crop consulting firm and plant disease diagnostic laboratory located in Plainfield, Wisconsin. Pest Pros provides a range of crop management services to assi...