Greenvale Seed, one of the UK’s leading suppliers of seed potatoes has announced it’s intention to exclusively supply UK growers with a new variety of potato. The variety named Tyson lives up to it’s big name punching above many other varieties on the UK market with it’s high yielding and disease resistant properties.
Greenvale Seed have been supplying UK potato growers with high quality seed for over 40 years and has brought many exclusive varieties to the UK for growers with the end results now firm favourites with many retail and processing customers as well as end consumers.
Niall Arbuckle, Head of Greenvale Seed has high hopes for Tyson and has been working with potato breeder STET on the project since it’s first crossing back in 2005 and is delighted to have now secured the exclusive rights to market the variety in the UK.
Arbuckle explained “We finally selected Tyson from a large number of promising varieties in 2015, as we were looking for an early baker to replace Marfona. Tyson has very good resistance to both common scab and powdery scab and has tolerated this year’s dry weather very well with high marketable yields. Early bulking is similar to Marfona, particularly under fleece or plastic.
In a departure from our normal marketing plan, we plan to offer the variety to all sectors of the UK potato trade and it will not be aligned to any specific retailer. We’ve worked with Stet closely on exports over the years and market their UK varieties such as Ramos and Eurostar. This agreement will build on this relationship and I look forward to making Tyson a successful, volume variety in the UK. We will have small volumes of Tyson available for customers to trial and welcome enquiries from all sectors of the industry.
Henk Holtslag, Fresh Manager at STET said “Tyson is a cross between from Sylvana and Cyrano. This round-oval variety has excellent characteristics including very bright skin, large size tubers needed for the baker market, cream flesh and a good dry matter content of 20% with a low bruising index. Additionally, Tyson has good resistance to blight, PCN A and wart disease, together with a high yield and an excellent baker percentage. Tyson has been introduced successfully in high quality demanding markets of UK and Israel.
