Zhangye Shandan County Ensures Quality and Promotes Sales of Potato Seed Tubers to Advance Industry Development

Shandan County is a major potato-growing county in the Hexi region of our province. The county has a total of 5 potato seed tuber enterprises, among which 2 are provincially licensed enterprises, including Gansu Tianrun Potato Industry Co., Ltd., which undertake the tasks of potato basic seed tuber breeding and foundation seed production, and are also units of the foundation seed subsidy project. They focus on producing Atlantic and Kexin series varieties. By the end of 2015, they had in stock 40 million self-produced microtuber seeds and more than 6,000 tons of foundation seeds. In order to enhance the vitality of the enterprises' own development, they fully implemented the “Full Coverage Project of Virus-free Potato Seed Tubers” to drive the development of the potato industry. Effective measures were taken and notable results were achieved. First, in basic seedling breeding, people, responsibilities, and quantities were fixed, and performance-linked measures were implemented to stimulate vitality, ensuring quantity on the basis of improving breeding quality; second, for microtuber breeding, net houses were used in summer and greenhouses in winter, strictly implementing technical operating procedures, with dedicated management, graded harvesting, counting and bagging, and labeling for storage; third, consolidating foundation seed breeding bases, developing quality seed production areas, and expanding the commercial order area. Up to now, about 4/5 of the seed tubers have been signed (or reached) pre-sale agreements with surrounding provinces and regions such as Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, and Gansu. The remaining 1/5 of the seed tubers (5 million microtuber seeds and 1,200 tons of foundation seeds) will complete pre-sale arrangements around the Spring Festival.