Mississippi State is Seeking a Solution for a Virus That Can Wipe Out 40% of Your Crop.
A $4.8 million USDA-funded project at Mississippi State University is overhauling the way America produces clean sweet potato seed, protecting a fast-growing American crop from viruses that can devastate yields before a single slip ever goes in the ground.
By the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, Mississippi State University — summarized for agInnovation
Sweet potatoes are having a moment. Americans are eating more of them than ever: per-person consumption has climbed from about four pounds a year in 2000 to nearly six pounds today. The North American market is projected to reach $7.7 billion by 2029. The crop has earned its superfood reputation: it’s loaded with vitamins A, B, and C, fiber, potassium, and beta carotene. For southern growers, it’s also a reliable income crop. But there’s a fundamental vulnerability hiding in the supply chain, one that most consumers never think about, and that costs producers dearly.
Sweet potatoes are susceptible to more than 30 viruses, six of which have a major impact on yield. And here’s the problem: when a grower plants slips, harvests the crop, and saves seed for the following year, any virus in that plant gets carried forward and grows more prolific with each generation. A virus load in sweet potato seed stock can cause yield reductions of 40% or higher. The only reliable defense is to start with clean, virus-free seed and then work hard to keep it that way. That’s exactly what the CleanSEED Project, led by researchers at Mississippi State University’s Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, is designed to make possible.
Backed by a $4.8 million grant from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the multi-institutional CleanSEED Project is taking a comprehensive approach: standardizing the language and quality control standards that clean seed programs use across the country, establishing best practices for growing clean plants from lab to greenhouse to field, developing better methods for detecting viruses and the weeds and pests that carry them, and conducting the economic analysis that will make the case for wider industry adoption in hard numbers. The team works closely with the National Clean Plant Network, the industry body whose motto captures the goal precisely: “Start clean; stay clean.”
The project is deliberately industry-driven: it grew from a 2020 priority declared by the U.S. Sweet Potato Council, and an industry advisory board guides its direction. That alignment between research and grower need is what gives this kind of land-grant science its staying power and it’s precisely the model that sustained federal investment in agricultural research is designed to support.
Read the full story at the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station.
Read the full story: Superfood of the South: MAFES Researchers Help Producers and Consumers Through Sweet Potato Clean Seed
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