Hello Michel.

So good to hear from you! I am very happy to have you join the OPBF. I'd love to hear all about your tour with Tom Wagner; I've long been a fan of his work.

Your breeding center idea is great. What can we do to help? I'd personally like to offer any proofreading/editing services, if you need them.

Do you think that Tom would be interested in having our members grow out some of his potato breeding stock? It would be a great way to test his work in many different climates and soils.

If you revisit this site, you will see a "call for help" - asking for help designing breeding projects for everyone, around tomatoes, potatoes, and onions. As an experienced breeder, we'd sure like to have your input. You can go to the Breeding Methods forum, the 2010 Projects topic at http://www.opbf.org/forum/1 to join in.

Again, welcome. As soon as I can get some international calling cards, I will give you a call to talk about what you are doing.

Baruch Bashan

Maureen Bostock talked to me about you today. Maureen is the writer of ''GROWING POTATOES ORGANICLY'', published by COG.

I am an organic potato and tomato breeder too ( and of many other crops).

I am just coming back from a one month breeding conference tour in Europe with Tom Wagner.

Maureen told me you are the nephew of Raoul Robinson. If it is the case, tell him I am one of his unknowned child lol...I admire his work soooo much, please thank him for me, he has been quite my inspiration...

I, too, am working on disease resistance. I love the concept of horizontal resistance. I have a few of the Sarpo potatoes here, but also many clones of Tom Wagner's ( and now my own) totally blight and cpb resistant taters. Pictures of some of them can be seen here, on the blog of Kokopelli, the french equivalent of SSE, but much better in terms of social and environmental activism :http://www.kokopelli-blog.org/?p=80

I have potatoes that resisted the last summer super killer blight mutation. I had, out of 200 new clones in trials, 5 of them that totally resisted disease, and, along with Sarpo Mira and Toluca, horizontaly resistant clones from Europe, all of them also seemed impervious to CPB, which I had the unpleasant task to look at while they were killing soooo many plants right besides the mentionned ones.

While I was in Europe, one of my gardens, a 3 acres one, was raided and emptied, I lost years of work, but I could salvage a few potatoes from 2 out of 5 blight resistant clones. In another garden ( I have 4 in different places for breeding purposes) that was plagued by the blight, I harvested last week 16 clones that seem to show tuber resistance. The blight mutation having showed itself in July, the fact they were healthy in the ground in December shows promises. I'll store them and see this winter, but since all the others were not only dead but already processed by soil microorganisms, I am pretty confident.

I have seeds from the berries of these 2 clones, I will more than gladly share them with you. I also have full access to Tom Wagner's 12,000 lines of taters, so if you need anything, just ask.

In Europe, everything was ALWAYS about blight resistance. In Belgium, we were giving the breeding conference in a room while across the corridor there was another one, held by the whole belgian tomato and potato industry, breeders, producers, buyers, food processors, government people etc...

We spoke to them for an hour and a half. The belgian government representatives asked for our clones, since they equate blight resistance with bad flavor, understandable when you taste their resistant clones but nevertheless totally false.

We have absolutely delicious clones. One of the 2 I salvaged is a red skinned with an almost orange flesh, very high in beta-carotene. I tasted 4 of them, they make killer mashed potatoes...

The taters are smallish, but I had only 3 plants grown from 3 micro tubers, there is a fair chance their size is actually just a matter of apical dominance, we will know more next year...in any case, small potatoes are all the rage here in my neck of the woods, they sell for 3.50$ to 5$ for 2 pounds....

Maureen talked to me about you because there is something in the air...I was asking her for contacts to support a beautiful project.

I am in the process ( in its infancy might I add) to create the first, and up to now only, international organic breeding center, in collaboration with Guelph University's Alfred college. The college is quite open to the idea, so are a very long list of canadian, foreign and international institutions. I have to write a project working document ( sorry, I am french speaking, and I hit a translation barrier here)

During my european trip, I discussed this project with a lot of people and organizations, they are all ready to jump in. And I get loads of request from Africa

The vast amount of research in the organic field is done around cultural practices, while in fact the answer to most problems is hidden in the genome. You sure know about this, you created this site out of this sad reality. And the great Raoul Robinson was all about genes.

We have more than disease resistant potatoes, we have tomatoes, corns, squashes, melons and so on....oh! and perennial rye and wheat that we are developping. They need poor arrid land to grow well, they are basically inter-specificly bred grains that are close to the wild species, they are a total dud in good soil, surviving only 2 years while they live 9-10 years and produce more in poor and non irrigated soil

I would love to have the privilege to talk to you about all this.

My phone number is 613-446-5776.

Thanks for reading this rather long message, and congratulations for your site. If you do not mind, I will contribute to it soon...

Michel Lachaume