What to Do About Sweet Potato Quality Degeneration? Cause Analysis and Prevention Measures
Sweet potato is a crop everyone is familiar with, and many farmer friends grow it. However, in sweet potato production, promoted varieties can become mixed and degenerate, which seriously affects their quality and yield. So what causes sweet potato quality degeneration? How can it be prevented? Let's take a look.
I. Causes of Sweet Potato Variety Degeneration
1. Mutation
Most promoted sweet potato varieties are first-generation hybrids from sexual crosses between varieties, with strong genetic heterozygosity. Although they are propagated vegetatively and their offspring perform relatively stably, after repeated vegetative propagation, the frequency of bud mutations still persists. As the proportion of variant types produced by bud sports continues to grow, their production value becomes lower year after year, causing variety degeneration.
2. Viral Disease
In some areas, viral diseases are quite severe, and leaf curl mosaic virus disease is one of the common viral diseases causing sweet potato degeneration. 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 selection and seed reservation work, multiple varieties are often mixed together and planted in the same plot at the same time. The characteristics and traits of different varieties differ, and their requirements for external and cultivation conditions also differ, ultimately significantly affecting the improvement of sweet potato growth and yield.
II. Prevention Measures
1. First, for newly promoted varieties, attention should be paid to selecting and reserving seed according to the traits and characteristics of the original variety. For varieties that have already degenerated, stricter selection should be further carried out to avoid artificially increasing degenerate types.
2. For the purification and rejuvenation of promoted varieties, this should be based on selecting vines for seed reservation, further selecting plants for seed reservation, identifying lines, and propagating stock seed in mixed lines. This has an extremely obvious effect on improving varietal 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 reserved plants, and identify the lines in the second year to compare yield and quality.
3. To overcome variety degeneration caused by mixing, it is necessary to prevent artificial mechanical mixing during harvesting, transport, storage, seedling raising and planting. If this cannot be achieved, then concentrate one variety in one plot, and when filling gaps with seedlings, also fill seedlings separately according to different varieties.
4. For variety degeneration caused by viral disease, it is generally not suitable to promote it. If individual plants develop viral disease, the diseased plants can be promptly pulled out and taken out of the field to be burned or buried deeply, so as to avoid harming other plants.
The above is an introduction to the causes of sweet potato variety degeneration and prevention measures. We hope it can help you. To learn more related knowledge, please follow us.