What to Do About Sweet Potato Quality Degradation? Cause Analysis and Prevention Measures

Sweet potato is a familiar crop, and many farmer friends grow it, but in production, promoted varieties of sweet potato can suffer from mixing and degradation, which seriously affects their quality and yield. So what causes sweet potato quality degradation? How can it be prevented? Let's take a look together.

I. Causes of Sweet Potato Variety Degradation

1. Mutation

Most promoted sweet potato varieties are first-generation hybrids from sexual crosses between varieties, with strong genetic heterozygosity, and although they are propagated asexually, their offspring perform relatively stably. However, after repeated asexual propagation, the frequency of bud mutation still exists, and as the proportion of variant types produced by bud sport bodies continually increases, their production value becomes lower year by year, causing variety degradation.

2. Viral disease

In some areas, viral disease occurs rather severely, and leaf curl mosaic viral disease is one of the common viral diseases causing sweet potato degradation; after infection with viral disease, yield decreases by 15%-30%.

3. Mixing

During operations such as harvesting, transport, storage, seedling raising, and planting, because attention is not paid to seed selection and retention work, multiple varieties are often mixed together and planted in the same plot at the same time. The characteristics and traits of the varieties differ, and their requirements for external and cultivation conditions also differ, ultimately significantly affecting sweet potato growth and yield improvement.

II. Prevention Measures

1. First, for newly promoted varieties, attention should be paid to selecting and retaining seed according to the traits and characteristics of the original variety, while for varieties that have already degraded, stricter seed selection should be further carried out to avoid artificially increasing the proportion of degraded types.

2. For the purification and rejuvenation of promoted varieties, this should be built on the basis of selecting vines for seed retention, further selecting plants for seed retention, line identification, and mixed-line propagation of foundation seed, which has an extremely obvious effect on improving seed quality. When planting, insert markers to select individual plants with the characteristics of this variety; after harvest, reselect according to productivity and the occurrence of pests and diseases, number the retained plants, and the following year identify the lines and compare yield and quality.

3. To overcome variety degradation caused by mixing, it is necessary to prevent artificial mechanical mixing during harvesting, transport, storage, seedling raising, and planting. If this cannot be done, then concentrate one variety in one plot, and when filling gaps, also fill seedlings separately according to different varieties.

4. For variety degradation caused by viral disease, it is generally not suitable for promotion. If individual plants develop viral disease, then diseased plants can be promptly pulled out, taken out of the field and burned or buried deeply, so as to avoid harming other plants.

  The above is an introduction to the causes and prevention measures of sweet potato variety degradation. I hope it can help you. To learn more related knowledge, please stay tuned to us.