The desert potato (Hoffmannseggia doelli) is a unique plant. It grows in extreme conditions, in full sun in the desert, under strong exposure to radiation and at high altitude. In this area the rainfall is scarce reaching only between 100 to 300 mm per year and there is also a high temperature fluctuation, with 40 ° C in the day and -8 ° C during the night. This plant generates a small tuber, which is an attractive alternative as food in the current climate change scenario.
Think about the advance of desertification towards the center of the country and the need to generate new crops that resist these conditions. It is the genesis of the project sponsored by the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC), with the support of the Foundation for Agrarian Innovation (FIA) that aims to establish the desert potato as a new crop capable of growing in marginal soils.
It will be four years of work with this plant. Although the desert potato has not been cultivated, there are records that it was collected and consumed by the ancient locals and shepherds who roamed this area of the Atacama Desert. Rodrigo Gutiérrez, principal coordinator of the project, has studied for more than 10 years different plants that grow in the desert, including Hoffmannseggia doelli. Among the most remarkable results, Dr. Gutiérrez’s team has revealed that the desert potato has a great nutritional value, being rich in potassium, fiber, iron and magnesium.
“This plant forms in its roots tubers that in ancient times were the food of native peoples. It also stands out because it grows in soils with low availability of nitrogen, which is a key nutrient. For this we will carry out the execution in different centers and one of them is the Millennium Institute of Integrative Biology (iBio), which has a sufficient trajectory in the matter”, says Rodrigo.
Innovation and context
Specifically, the project on the recovery of the potato from the desert was one of the 29 initiatives promoted in the last National Call for Projects 2020-2021 of the Foundation for Agricultural Innovation (FIA), and that responds to one of the strategic challenges of the sector, such as water efficiency and adaptation to climate change.
In this scenario, one of the main challenges facing agriculture is to adapt crops to stressful environmental conditions, also taking into account that it is necessary to increase productivity to feed the growing world population.
“One option to address this problem is the use of ancestral crops, currently not promoted since industrialized agriculture has opted for more profitable crops, however the revaluation of endemic ancestral plants opens a new opportunity. This project proposes to establish the desert potato as a new crop capable of growing in marginal soils. To achieve this goal, it is hoped to standardize a protocol for growing potatoes in conditions of drought and low nitrogen availability and transfer to a potato producing association in northern Chile,” says FIA Executive Director Álvaro Eyzaguirre.
To try to position this plant as a crop, Viviana Araus, from iBio and part of the team, explains that standardizing a culture and management protocol in conditions of drought and low nitrogen availability, and will transfer all the knowledge to the Farmers Association of Socaire, in the north of Chile. It also contemplates the design of a strategy for marketing desert potato products in the national market to support farmers.
On the other hand, it seeks to include farmers in the optimization of the protocol, by conducting field tests in direct collaboration with workers in the northern part of the country.
“We will give them the protocols to carry out the desert potato cultivation tests and we will receive their observations of the process, taking into consideration the peasant knowledge and the construction of joint knowledge with the technical team of the project. Finally we hope to finish the project having a sustainable product in time that allows the commercialization of this potato”, concludes Araus.
This initiative is part of the work being led by FIA in the northern macrozone to install a Natural Laboratory for Desert Agriculture, whose objective is to form a roadmap to study and promote agriculture adapted to extreme phenomena.
