Syngenta Biostimulants Boost Potato Yields and Stress Resilience at Potatoes in Practice

Biostimulant strategies can help potato crops better cope with field stress conditions, as well as routinely enhance tuber numbers and proportion of marketable crop, according to results of plots at Potatoes in Practice Open Day at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland.

Syngenta Field Technical Manager, Andy Cunningham, highlights in plots of Maris Piper, a dig of the standard farm treatment produced 90 tubers from six plants, weighing about six kilos in total, an equivalent of 40-45 t/ha. The very indeterminate variety, widely grown as a ware variety had been managed as a seed crop at the site, with just 90 kg on nitrogen in the seedbed.

Andy Cunningham, Field Technical Manager at Syngenta

However, using just one application of the Syngenta biofertiliser Vixeran at tuber initiation delivered a 10% increase in tuber numbers, along with improving the fraction of tubers in a more marketable grade, he reports. Vixeran is an endophyte product applied as a foliar spray onto the growing crop that colonises the root and soil biosphere, to fix atmospheric nitrogen into a readily available form for the plant. That enhances the crop growth, as well as aiding tuber initiation and producing more tubers.

Also in the trial, the plant extract product Quantis that can help crops through periods of stress, particularly temperature stress, enabled the tubers to bulk up considerably into the marketable yield brackets. With the extreme conditions through the 2025 season, multiple applications were made prior to periods of temperature stress post tuber initiation. 

Quantis prevented the pause in bulking seen with untreated crops, and enabled the plants to keep growing through pinch points in the season under severe stress. The final demonstration plots received the hugely proven Maxicrop seaweed extract, with enriched NPK nutrients, throughout the season. The strategy improved tuber numbers by more than 20% compared to untreated, as well as increasing the proportion in the marketable grade. 

Maxicrop is sourced from the Ascophyllum nodosum species of seaweed in the Norwegian seas, harvested from the intertidal zone where it has been subjected to the harshest conditions of repeated daily drying out and temperature extremes. Exploiting the compounds that help seaweed to cope with those stresses, can help crops like potatoes to enhance resilience against field stress conditions. 

Further trials across the UK, using all the Syngenta biological products individually or in integrated stress management strategies, will be on display and discussed at the British Potato Event in November.