Do potatoes produce seeds that you can store and/or replant?

Question

Do potatoes produce seeds (specifically La Ratte potato) and how do you harvest them? Although I don't fully understand, I am aware that "seed potatoes" are a thing and can be used to grow a new potato plant. I'm looking for a long term storage solution and the ability to plant many additional potato plants from a single parent, preferably by using a actual seed. I'm very new to farming, and I know basically nothing, so if my understanding of any of this is completely wrong then please correct me.

UPDATE

Wow! Thank you all so very much for your very generous and informative comments. I honestly didn't expect this much feedback from such a simple question lol but it is DEEPLY appreciated. Thank you thank you thank you all.

Based on this incredible feedback I would like to add further details about my situation to see if anyone has any further recommendations or would like to add mention anything else based on their previous comments.

I'm a DevOps engineer by trade who's volunteering at a local nonprofit. I saw an opportunity to use my skills to create a fully autonomous and highly scalable aeroponics garden for feeding the needy. We want to grow and distribute fresh and very high quality food to the needy and eventually sell the same crops commercially with all of the proceeds being used to expand our food donation programs.

Is there anything I should be aware of when growing La Ratte potatoes using aeroponics? Also @HagenvonEitzen had mentioned potential "licensing issues" for growing crops commercially. Would purchasing seeds from Seed Savers, Burpee, Arbico Organics and Ferry-Morse be a problem legally speaking and not just for potatoes but for seeds in general? Our goal is to only donate/sale produce that is USDA Non GMO organic (which I believe is the highest grade please correct me if I'm wrong). Does anyone have any recommendations for reputable and low cost seed distributors that offer USDA Non GMO seeds that can be sold commercially? And finally, would growing and distributing food to the needy that was produced from "patented" seeds be a legal issue? Thanks in advance for you feedback!

Answer 1

Most potatoes, as far as I know, have the ability to flower and set fruit. The fruits, known as berries, are small green globes reminiscent of tomatoes, which makes sense seeing as how they're in the same family. It's very important to note that these fruits are somewhat poisonous, though! The seeds in the berries are viable and can, indeed, be planted for a crop the next year.

But they are not seed potatoes. The term 'seed potato' refers to a single potato that is cut up into pieces, with each piece containing an eye. The eye is the part that sprouts into a new plant. This makes all commercially available potatoes clones.

If you were to harvest potato berries and plant them for a crop, the potatoes you would get would not be the same as the potatoes from which you harvested the berries. They could be better, but odds are that they will be similar to or worse than the original potatoes. This site has more information on potato berries, including timing for harvesting the berries and saving the seeds.

Answer 2

The tubers that are used for "seed potatoes" are grown and harvested exactly the same way as other potatoes, except for one thing.

Like other members of the same plant family (e.g. tomatoes), potatoes are are easily infected with virus diseases. Some of these (like "potato blight") are serious and may cause the entire crop to fail. Others don't have any visible effect on the plant (and are also harmless to humans who eat the potatoes), but they will survive in the potatoes you harvest and can also survive for years in the soil.

If you plant potato tubers that are infected with such viruses, the only thing you will "see" is that you get a smaller crop than you expected, which is obviously a bad thing if you are growing commercially. If you continue doing this for several years the virus will accumulate in the soil so that even if you plant uninfected seed potatoes, they will become infected at soon as they start to grow.

Virus spores can also be carried by the wind, so your infected potato crop can infect others that are being grown several miles away.

"Seed potatoes" are grown in carefully chosen locations with the right climate to minimize the risk of virus infection. (For example, in the UK most seed potatoes are grown in Scotland, not in the main potato growing areas of England). The climate for growing seed potatoes often doesn't produce a crop of fully grown "large" potatoes, but that doesn't matter for producing seed to be grown elsewhere the following year. If there is no commercial potato growing in the area, the risk of virus infection from outside sources is reduced.

A seed potato crop will also be tested for virus diseases by sending samples to a testing laboratory, both during the growing season and after harvesting.

Answer 3

There are already good general answers to this question, but I will add a couple of specifics. La Ratte is male and female fertile variety, so it is capable of producing seeds without a pollinator. If there are no other male fertile varieties nearby, the seeds will be self-pollinated. Self-pollinated seeds of La Ratte produce mostly tubers similar to the parent: white skin fingerlings or oval tubers with white to light yellow flesh on mid to late season plants. It is important to recognize that these seedling varieties will be genetically distinct from La Ratte. Each will be a new variety, which you can maintain by replanting the tubers. The odds that you would get something as good as La Ratte when evaluated across a wide range of traits are low, but the odds that you would get something reasonably productive and tasty that would be unique to your garden are high. It is also worth noting that La Ratte gives some progeny with high glycoalkaloid content, so you should be alert for bitter flavor in the seedlings and discard those, as bitterness indicates higher glycoalkaloid content. You wouldn't get anything too dangerous from a self-pollinated domesticated potato, but you could make yourself sick by eating too much of a bitter potato.

True potato seeds do have a significant storage advantage over tubers, since seed tubers must be planted and regenerated every year. True potato seeds retain good germination for about five years at room temperature, but can last 50 years or more when fully dried and stored in the freezer.

Answer 4

Replying to the update:

I am not an expert at growing aeroponic or hydroponic potatoes. In fact, I have never done it. I do know a thing or two about potatoes though, so take this on the balance. Normally, aeroponics is used to grow seed potatoes, not potatoes for eating. The problem is that you need to input an enormous amount of energy to get potatoes to mature size under artificial light. In conventional hydroponic systems, the focus is on early varieties for new potatoes, where you can turn over crops quickly and get a premium price that justifies the high cost. La Ratte is a late season potato. You would need to keep it under lights for a minimum of four months. Whether or not this makes sense will depend on your power costs, but to compete commercially, you will be up against a majority of growers who produced their potatoes under free sunlight.

You don't need to worry much about intellectual property restrictions or GMO with seed potatoes in the USA. There are a few varieties under PVP (plant variety protection), which you would not be allowed to produce commercially without permission, but those will be clearly noted as long as you buy from a reputable seed potato supplier. The few GMO varieties are only available with a contract. Don't start with stock from the grocery store and you won't have to worry about these things.

And then to the comment:

This gets into an area where opinions diverge wildly and the specifics differ by crop. There are relatively few IP restricted potatoes, but corn is overwhelmingly genetically modified and covered under some kind of IP protection. The odds of contamination with GM genetics are very low in an insect pollinated crop like potatoes, particularly since almost nobody grows potatoes from seed anyway. In a wind pollinated crop like corn, where pollen can travel miles and the crop is grown from the seed, there is a much higher risk of contamination. Whether or not these things actually happen or actually matter if they do, the idea still bothers people.

With potatoes, varieties under patents or PVP are overwhelmingly directed at large scale producers. Their improvements tend to matter little to gardeners or small farmers, being things like improved disease resistance that are of greatest value under monocrop conditions, but they can make a difference when you grow commodity potatoes for processing and your profit is less than a penny per potato. Organic farmers tend to focus on fresh eating types that are usually managed more attentively and don't require the same kind of optimization. Many of the most popular fresh eating varieties for organic conditions are 50 years old or more. They generally won't perform well under conditions that are difficult for potatoes or where disease pressure is high but, on a small scale, you probably wouldn't notice much difference between a quality heirloom and a cutting edge GMO commodity potato.