2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
Potatoes are one of the predominant and productive agricultural crops, a valuable food product, fodder and industrial crop
Currently, potatoes are grown by farmers in almost all countries of the world: at an altitude of more than 4 thousand meters in the mountains of Latin America and Asia, below sea level behind artificial dams in the northern part of the European continent, near the Arctic Circle and the Strait of Magellan, in the sultry deserts of Australia and Africa. The only exceptions are humid equatorial jungles and swampy areas.
In Europe, by the beginning of the 18th century, when most of the peasants began to cultivate this crop, there was a surplus of food. Potatoes have become a profitable crop for export.
The Irish, for example, have a widespread proverb that potatoes and marriage are too serious things to make fun of. The Dutch set aside a fourth of the arable land for this culture. Their potatoes are the most profitable part of export, bringing in net profit more than the famous tulips. Potato growers in Germany, France and Belgium also receive high and stable yields.
Potatoes, as a vegetable crop, began to spread in Russia from the end of the 18th century. Since that time, potatoes have gradually won their high title of "second bread". Currently, this crop is grown everywhere in all regions.
The old, and deeply fair, Russian folk proverb "Potatoes are a sucker for bread" was not born out of nowhere. It was she, the potato, who more than once saved millions of Russians and people of other nations from starvation during the years of crop failures and in the tumult of wars.
We eat potatoes every day in a wide variety of dishes, satisfying to a large extent the body's needs for many essential nutrients.
In terms of their nutritional value, potatoes are ahead of cereals such as wheat, rice or corn.
Potatoes are successfully grown in mountainous and northern regions - where these crops cannot grow. And yields vary greatly. In suitable soil and climatic conditions, with high agricultural technology, good seeds, timely and complete (but not excessive) satisfaction of the needs of plants for moisture, air and nutrients, the weight of the crop of tubers per unit area can exceed the weight of the crop of grain, for example, of winter wheat by 5 -10 times. If the crop of tubers is formed within 60-130 days, then grains - within 250-270 days.
It has been proven that one potato tuber weighing up to 100 grams meets the daily human need for vitamin C (ascorbic acid). This truth is familiar to sailors and polar explorers - scurvy is not terrible with potatoes. Depending on the variety, the content of this vitamin in potatoes ranges from 10 to 50 mg per 100 g of tubers. There is more of it in freshly harvested tubers, less after winter storage.
Due to its unique chemical composition, potato tubers have medicinal properties.
Potatoes are widely used as raw materials in the processing industry (alcohol, starch and syrup).
Individual gardeners who have cattle, poultry, pigs in their backyard successfully use potatoes for feed, and they use not only tubers, but also tops. From green tops mixed with tops of root crops, waste of cabbage and other vegetables, you can prepare excellent silage, the fodder value of which is not lower than that of corn. Tubers are fed raw, steamed and boiled. Pets willingly eat them all year round, significantly increasing the yield and quality.
The potato is immortalized in paintings and monuments.
Van Gogh. "The Potato Eaters".
The first potato fields in Russia appeared on the territory of today's Leningrad Region during the reign of Catherine II on the estate of A. S. Pushkin's great-grandfather.
In 2005, a separate potato museum was opened in the A. Hannibal's estate museum (Leningrad Region, Gatchinsky District, Suida settlement).
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