‘Climate change will force potato growers to look beyond Roosters’

Ireland’s most popular variety of potatoes is facing challenges in the face of climate change.

Roosters, which that take longer than some other varieties to mature, have been slower to yield with the unpredictable weather.

“If we were to design a potato variety for a variable climate, we couldn’t be picking the Rooster,” said agricultural consultant Richard Hackett.

“It has a longer yield period and needs too much of a good growing season for it to grow well. So if we were to adapt our food production, we need to look at different varieties.

“There’s a lot of work to be done. The variety has been very successful, it continues to be popular and it has many strengths.

“But it has a weakness, as our climate is changing. In the last number of years, there have been difficult times. We have great difficulties with the rooster variety.

“The Rooster is a late-maturing variety — it needs 160 days to mature. If our harvest runs late, the planting is late or we get cold weather during the summer, the maturity is very late and we have a late harvest.

“Once we’re in the later part of the year, it’s harder to grow good quality crops. We have other varieties that mature in 120 days and grow much faster – we should be looking into them too.”

A 2022 study by the Irish Journal of Agricultural and Food Research predicted that predicted changes in the physical climate “may alter the face of potato production in Ireland”.

The study pointed out that the most visible changes have been specialisation of the industry, changes in the crops, decline in area, investment in technology and a reduction in the number of growers.

It forecast that the next 60 years are likely to be equally, if not more, challenging adding: “Climate change will impact the physical growing environment for all crops, and potato growers will have to adapt accordingly.”

In the UK, a similar trend has led to their leading potato suppliers to look into developing alternative varieties to the ‘customer favourite’ Maris Piper due to soaring costs and unreliable yield during extreme weather conditions likes floods and droughts.

Over the past six years, the reducing margins have been worsened by higher energy and fertiliser prices.

“If we are to believe climatologists, we will get warmer summers and the climate will get wetter — these are conditions in which we can’t plant,” said Hackett.

“Last year, our planting was delayed, we didn’t get to do it until May when we should get planting around April. So we lost 30 days there. And then we got a drought in the middle of summer, then the potatoes stopped growing.

“Because the Rooster is so popular, people need them all year round. What we need is a range of varieties to supplement it. If we took different varieties that matured at different times, the farmers can keep going at different times of the year.

“It costs so much to produce a variety of potatoes that you can only go with what you can sell.

“The problem is that the marketplace is telling us that Rooster is the only variety you can sell.

“What we need is an industry-led plan to design and promote a range of varieties that are suitable for different times of the year.”