Durgan, what exactly is your problem with the discussion going on here? No one has said that the garden writers with their potato boxes and 100 lbs of potatoes are telling the truth -- that it will work with normal cultivars. I don't think anyone here believes that crap any more than they believe in "Organic Tomato Magic". You can't seriously think that modern commercial potato varieties grown in Canada and the northern US are representative of all ancestral varieties grown in Peru and Chile. That is like saying that all tomatoes are round red determinant varieties. Do you want us to say that you are right, that all potatoes are grow exactly like the few commercial varieties that you have grown? It is safe to say that nearly all potatoes for commercial mechanized production grow like you show; those that don't are not around. People in this discussion are not growing or talkiing about those varieties, and they have had no reason to take pictures when digging their tubers. Taking a camera into a field of tomatoes is one thing but it is another when your back hurts and you ar covered in dirt. If you do not believe the word of a professional potato breeder you surely are not going to believe pictures that could easily be photoshopped.
"TPS is to produce a new strain, which is a tedious process. Most TPS potatoes are crap. At least growing from seed tubers, (Clones) one can predict what will be produced."
Producing a new clone of potatoes is less tedious than doing so for tomatoes or any other vegetable where seed is involved. You plant the true seed the first year, harvest the seed potatoes at the end of the season, weed out undesirable clones then, and plant production potatoes the second year, enough for a small row anyway to get a good idea of what you have. It takes you seven generations to stabilize a new tomato variety through selection. Potatoes take one or two generations to do the selections.
Most new clones are not crap. They may not be as good as the commercial varieties as far as shape and production, but most give at least moderate yields and have average flavor. People here are not trying to reinvent the wheel by making a better white chipping or russet baking potato in their back yard. They are trying to develop something that they cannot get in the supermarket, and would at the very least have to pay a lot of money mail ordering seed tubers for unusual varieties. I have fifty row feet of a red skinned dark yellow fleshed variety growing that I developed from TPS two seasons ago. I cannot buy seed potatoes to substitute, AFAIK.
I do not understand why you are so hooked on bashing TPS potato growers and not tomato growers. Most of this forum site is devoted to talk about growing tomato varieties that you feel are crap -- home developed heirlooms that by your criteria of production are not as good as modern commecial hybrids.
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