First Sweet Potato Trials

In Spring 2008 we brought our first Sweet Potato plants into our laboratory with the very kind help of the people at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge USA.

We had never ventured into the production of Sweet Potato (Ipomea batatas) before. It was a new area for our plant nursery and we found some very helpful namely Professor Don LaBonte of Louisiana State University Louisiana USA. Don gave me some valuable advice and helped me along my way in sourcing true to type virus clean plants of Ipomea batatas Beauregard the standard industry commercial variety at the time. Beauregard was the exact variety my desk research had shown to be most suitable for our climate. In my desk research the variety Georgia Jet was also highly recommended but Beauregard seemed to be a better quality variety for storage and skin colour, Georgia Jet seemed to problematic especially for Northern European soils and climatic conditions. In our cooking we found Beauregard also to be a better taste than Georgia Jet. Later on in 2013 we started working with purple sweet potato varieties, building on the agronomic knowledge gained from our Beauregard trials and expanding into the functional food ingredient space.

Our first field trials took place in the summer of 2008 in Kilkenny, Ireland. The results were encouraging — Beauregard adapted well to the Irish climate and soil conditions, producing good yields with acceptable tuber quality. These early trials confirmed our belief that sweet potato cultivation was viable in Ireland and laid the foundation for what would become a core part of Beotanics’ crop portfolio. Over the following years, we refined our propagation methods, optimised planting schedules, and developed post-harvest handling protocols tailored to our conditions. Today, Beotanics is recognised as a pioneer in European sweet potato production, supplying both fresh and processed sweet potato products to the food industry.