American Journal of Potato Research最新文献

Plant preference in agricultural pests is a prerequisite for expansion onto cultivated crops, but there has been limited research on how an insect determines host plant suitability. We investigated Colorado potato beetle Leptinotarsa decemlineata (CPB) performance on various populations of the wild potato Solanum jamesii (jam), with which it has overlapping natural range in the southwest USA. Herbivory was measured in no-choice feeding assays in the greenhouse and common garden field plots in Wisconsin. The jam populations were categorized according to whether CPB had been observed to be present in the wild in germplasm collection records. Herbivory on all jam populations was very low compared to the tuberosum cultivar control. In the no-choice greenhouse assay, all jam were equally consumed by CPB. But in field plots where choice was allowed, CPB were significantly more attracted to jam populations on which CPB had been observed in the wild. Although documenting the presence of CPB on wild jam populations was non-systematic and qualitative in germplasm collecting expeditions over multiple years, that observation does appear to have some value in predicting which jam will be more attractive to CPB in Wisconsin field conditions.

Potatoes are the most highly consumed vegetable in the United States and are the primary source of antioxidants in the American diet. Therefore, technologies and growing methods that aim to enhance the nutritional quality of potatoes can have positive impacts on public health. Based on past success with other food crops, we hypothesized that inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) would increase both the yield and nutritional quality of potatoes. To test this hypothesis, we grew yellow fleshed (cv. Lehigh) and purple fleshed (cv. Adirondack Blue) potatoes in containers with several monospecific AMF inoculants comprised of Rhizophagus irregularis, Funneliformis mosseae, or Claroideoglumus etunicatum, and one indigenous mixed species population inoculant. Overall, we found that AMF inoculation increased potato tuber yield by up to 23%, antioxidant activity by up to 120%, ergothioneine concentration by up to 9X, and soluble sugar concentration by up to 46%, and that the extent of these increases varied by mycorrhizal species. Future research should examine the extent to which inoculation with the most beneficial AMF species reported here improves yield and nutritional quality in the field setting.

Potato production in the hilly and mountainous areas of Northwest China on small plots and sloping lands, does not allow large machines to enter the ground and to turn at the end of the field. Existing mechanized potato diggers usable on small plots of land require manual picking, which is very labor intensive. To address these issues, a remotely controlled, self-propelled potato combined harvester with manual sorting platform has been designed and a prototype built. The design and calculation of the main system of the prototype machine are presented in the paper. These include the structure and working parameters of the bionic excavating device, the potato-soil separating and lifting device, the double-channel sorting mechanism of potatoes and sundries, the hydraulic control of the jumbo bag loading and unloading mechanism, the crawler-type self-propelled chassis walking system, the transmission system and hydraulic control system, and the operating mechanism of the core components. Field experiments showed that the potato loss rate was 1.6%, the injury rate was 1.1%, the impurity rate was 2.3%, the skin broken rate was 1.8%, and the productivity was 0.1 to 0.13 hectares/hour. All the indexes of the field performance test meet the national and industrial standards, and the test results meet the design requirements for combined operations of excavating, separation, transportation, sorting, collecting, and unloading potatoes.

Abstract

Above-ground biomass (AGB) is one of the most important indicators for evaluating potato growth and yield. Rapid and accurate biomass estimation is of great significance to potato breeding and agricultural production. However, high cost, large data volume, and poor model scalability are the main problems of hyperspectral remote sensing and LiDAR in existing AGB measurement methods, especially in small-scale farmland. One of the important methods for solving the above problems is extracting canopy structure features through RGB images. In this study, a new AGB estimation method for potatoes at the field scale was proposed by using canopy leaf detection and digital images. First, using the improved feature fusion network and the soft intersection over union (soft-IoU) layer, an improved detection network of dense leaves, DenseNet-potato, was developed to detect canopy leaves. Second, the detection network was used to extract the canopy structural features, and the corrected number and total area of canopy leaves were obtained. Finally, multilayer perceptron (MLP) regression was introduced to build prediction models for AGB using canopy features. It was found that the DenseNet-potato network had excellent detection effects on dense canopy leaves. The mAP₅₀ and mAP₇₅ of the two detection pipelines reached 76.63% and 64.35%, respectively, which were 9.17% and 6.05% higher than the state-of-the-art RetinaNet method. In addition, the results indicated a strong correlation between the estimated and field-observed AGB using the MLP method from the digital camera dataset (R² = 0.83, RMSE = 0.039 kg/plot, NRMSE = 12.16%), while the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) dataset was unsatisfactory (R² = 0.62, RMSE = 0.051 kg/plot, NRMSE = 15.32%). This study can provide a reference for efficiently estimating potato AGB using RGB images.

Cheatgrass (Bromus techtorum) is an non-native grass that has invaded the natural range of the two wild potato species in the USA. We sought to detect evidence that it suppresses Solanum jamesii (jam). We grew flats of 12 cheatgrass populations and dried and stored the straw and the media containing the roots. In the following year, we again prepared flats of actively growing grass as well as flats with plain potting medium as control. One sprouted tuber of each of 35 jam populations was planted in flats of each of the 12 cheatgrass populations for each treatment: Control, Grass, Straw, and Roots. Percent shoots emerged in Root media treatment was not significantly different from Control, each at about 93%, but Grass (70%) and Straw (80%) were significantly lower than Control. The 12 cheatgrass populations inhibited jam tuber shoots compared to Control differently, as Grass (8% to 43% reduction) and as Straw (0% to 33% reduction). Subjective scores of the vigor of cheatgrass and emerged jam stands indicated that a more vigorous stand of cheatgrass is associated with less vigorous jam shoots. It appears that cheatgrass can significantly inhibit jam shoots from sprouted tubers even when growing in optimal conditions.