New Leader For Lincoln Vegetable Breeding

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31084, 13 June 1966, Page 8

New Leader For Lincoln Vegetable Breeding

Dr. L. E. Watts, a Welshman who joined the staff of the Crop Research Division of the Department Of Scientific and Industrial Research at Lincoln last year, has been appointed to take charge of the division’s vegetable breeding programme. Mr D. Yen, who has been in charge of the division’s vegetable research station at Otara for the last 13 years, has resigned to take up an appointment as an ethnobotanist at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii and will leave the employment of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research on June 20.

The director of the Crop Research Division, Dr. H. C. Smith, said the division would be expanding greatly the programme of breeding peas and beans for processing to meet the expected expansion in the export trade to Australia. At Lincoln, he said, Mr H. J. Giesen would carry on his work breeding brassicas, tomatoes and carrots. The division would advertise for another plant breeder to be stationed at Otara to carry on the breeding programme there. Some work would be continued there ,while other work would be transferred to Lincoln. Quality Selection Dr. A. Schippers, who was at Otara, was developing methods for selecting improved quality in vegetable crops. He had already designed equipment for testing pungency and keeping quality in onions, firmness and colour assessment in tomatoes and for quality assessment in peas and beans for processing. Dr. Smith said that MiYen’s contributions to the vegetable industry had included the development of wilt and mosaic-resistant varieties of garden and field peas and he had also supervised the programme of breeding and selection of new varieties of carrots, cabbages

and pole beans and had started programmes for breeding better varieties of pumpkins, carrots and tomatoes. He had also been involved in the development of hybrid onion varieties, which would shortly be released for commercial production in New Zealand.

These hybrid varieties and some new selections of the Pukekohe variety should enable New Zealand to expand export markets in Australia, South-east Asia and Japan greatly. In the field he would be going to at Hawaii, Mr Yen’s major contribution had been in the study of the sweet potato or kumara in relation to the culture of the native races of the Pacific. He had travelled widely under Rockefeller grants in New Guinea, the New Hebrides, the Philippines and South America. He had the largest collection in the world of kumaras and these had been grown and tested, but no variety as yet had yielded as well as the standard New Zealand variety. Dr. Watts, who now takes over the responsibility for the future development of the vegetable breeding programme in New Zealand, completed a bachelor of science degree in agriculture at the University of Wales and completed a doctorate of science while working at the National Vegetable Research Station in Britain.