Sweet potato research funding has been cut year after year; a century of breeding in Taiwan, China relies on researchers persevering through gritted teeth

"Sweet potatoes do not fear rotting in the soil; they only ask that their branches and leaves spread on generation after generation." For the researchers who breed sweet potatoes (also called earth potatoes), this proverb, so familiar to the ears of Taiwanese people, is not merely a metaphor but a concrete and precise work goal, year after year. In the blink of an eye, sweet potato breeding in Taiwan has been going on for nearly a hundred years.

Through vast rice paddies and dense, lush groves of trees stands a Japanese-style building rich in a sense of history; this is the Chiayi Agricultural Experiment Branch of the Agricultural Research Institute. The sweet potatoes we eat, whether the most widely planted and much-loved Tainung No. 57, or Tainung No. 66, the star of the Jinshan Sweet Potato Festival, as well as the latest variety "Jinxiang" Tainung No. 74, regarded as a rising star for tomorrow

The Root and Tuber Crops Laboratory, headed by Lai Yung-chang, director of the Agronomy Division, was previously called the Sweet Potato Breeding Laboratory and has devoted itself to sweet potato selection and breeding since the Japanese colonial era. "At that time we were called the Chiayi Agricultural Experiment Branch Station, directly under the Governor-General's Office!" Lai Yung-chang, who has spent his whole life studying sweet potatoes, recounted in detail the hundred-year history of breeding.