Timeline of the Potato
The potato from its domestication in the Andes, about 10,000 to 7,000 years ago, through its arrival in Europe in the 1560s, worldwide spread, late blight and the Irish famine of the 1840s, to the International Potato Center and genome-based breeding through 2025.
- Category
- Agriculture & Food
- Events
- 25 events ~8000 BCE – 2025
- Generated
- by claude-opus-5-5
~8000 – 5000 BCE: Andean farmers domesticate the potato
Farmers in the highlands of southern Peru and northwestern Bolivia, around Lake Titicaca, domesticated the potato from wild species of the Solanum brevicaule complex; a 2005 genetic study led by David Spooner pointed to a single origin from wild populations in Peru. Estimates of when range from about 10,000 to 7,000 years ago, because tubers rarely survive for archaeologists to find and date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato#Domestication~500 – 1000: Tiwanaku farmers grow potatoes on raised fields
Around Lake Titicaca, farmers of the Tiwanaku culture grew potatoes and quinoa on raised planting beds separated by water-filled canals, which supplied moisture and nutrients, drained floods and helped protect crops from night frost. The technique, known as waru waru or suka kollus, predates the Tiwanaku state, and archaeologists have revived it experimentally since the 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waru_Waru15th – 16th centuries: Inca storehouses stockpile freeze-dried potatoes
The Inca state filled networks of hillside storehouses (qollqa) with chuño, potatoes freeze-dried by repeated exposure to night frost and daytime sun, which kept for years. It fed soldiers, officials and laborers and served as a reserve after crop failures. Andean peoples made chuño before the Inca, and after the Spanish conquest it also fed workers at the silver mines of Potosí.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_agriculture1553: Cieza de León describes the potato in print
The first part of Pedro Cieza de León's "Chronicle of Peru", published in Seville, described the papa as a staple tuber in the Andes. Spanish expeditions had encountered the crop before publication, but the introduction of potatoes to Europe is more securely documented by trade records from the later 16th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Cieza_de_Le%C3%B3n1567: Canary Islands export potatoes to Antwerp
A record dated November 28 in the archives of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria notes barrels of potatoes shipped from Gran Canaria to Antwerp, the earliest known written record of the crop outside South America; by 1573 a hospital in Seville was buying them. DNA from herbarium specimens shows that Andean potatoes predominated in Europe through the 1700s, until Chilean types suited to long summer days, present by 1811, took over before the blight of the 1840s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato#Europe1597: Gerard's Herball misplaces the potato's home in Virginia
John Gerard's illustrated Herball, published in London, gave one of the earliest English descriptions of the potato but said it came from Virginia, an error behind the name "Virginia potato." The tuber had reached the British Isles by the 1590s; popular stories crediting Walter Raleigh or Francis Drake with introducing it are unsupported, and the Raleigh legend is first recorded in 1693.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gerard#Herball_1597early 17th century: European sailors carry the potato to Asia
European sailors, who carried tubers as food on long voyages, brought the potato to India, China and Japan early in the 17th century, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); in China it is recorded from the late Ming dynasty, which ended in 1644. It spread slowly, and large-scale production in China and India developed mainly in the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato#Asia~1750 – 1815: Northern Europe moves potatoes from gardens to fields
Promoted by officials and landowners in France and the German states, and made urgent by famines in the early 1770s, potatoes spread from garden plots into open fields across northern Europe, and by the early 19th century they were a staple across much of the region. Economists Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian estimated that the potato accounted for roughly 12 to 25 percent of Old World population growth from 1700 to 1900 and nearly half of the rise in urbanization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange1756: Frederick the Great orders potato planting in Silesia
Frederick the Great's circular of March 24 told district officials in Silesia, the grain-growing heart of Prussia, to promote potato planting and to check that farmers complied; it was the best known of at least 15 such decrees, the first issued in 1746. Historians judge their immediate effect limited, and tales that Frederick introduced the crop or tricked peasants by guarding potato fields are later legends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_Edict1772: Parmentier wins a French prize promoting the potato
Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a French army pharmacist who had eaten potatoes as a prisoner of war in Prussia during the Seven Years' War, won the Academy of Besançon's contest on foods to relieve famine with an essay championing the potato, and the Paris Faculty of Medicine endorsed it as safe to eat. The tale that he posted guards around a potato field to tempt thieves is apocryphal, and similar stories are told of Frederick the Great.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine-Augustin_Parmentier1845: Late blight reaches Europe from North America
Phytophthora infestans, a water mold (oomycete) rather than a true fungus, had been destroying potato crops in the eastern United States since 1843. Probably carried across the Atlantic in shipments of potatoes, it appeared in Belgium in the summer, spread across northern Europe within weeks and reached Ireland by September. Whether the pathogen originated in central Mexico or the Andes is still debated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora_infestans#Historical_impact1845 – 1852: Blight triggers the Great Famine in Ireland
Late blight destroyed harvests in Ireland, where many poor households depended heavily on potatoes. Economic historian Joel Mokyr estimated 1.1 – 1.5 million deaths in 1846 – 1851; more than a million people emigrated. Land inequality, poverty and inadequate British relief turned crop failure into a prolonged famine while food exports continued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)1859: Colorado potato beetle begins attacking potato crops
The Colorado potato beetle, native to the region between Colorado and northern Mexico, where it fed on wild nightshades, turned to settlers' potato crops on the Great Plains and reached the Atlantic coast by 1874. Farmers' use of arsenic-based Paris green against it from the mid-1860s was among the first widespread uses of a chemical insecticide on crops. The beetle later spread across Europe and has evolved resistance to more than 50 insecticides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle1861: De Bary shows a water mold causes late blight
The German botanist Anton de Bary published a study tracing the life cycle of the organism later named Phytophthora infestans through potato leaves and tubers, showing that it causes late blight rather than arising from diseased tissue; his inoculation experiments of 1863 confirmed it. The work is often credited with founding experimental plant pathology. Copper-based Bordeaux mixture, introduced in France in the 1880s against grapevine mildew, was later also sprayed against blight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Anton_de_Bary1902: Russet Burbank potato released as Netted Gem
L. L. May & Co. of St. Paul, Minnesota, released a russet-skinned variant of the Burbank potato under the name Netted Gem. Later known as Russet Burbank, it became widely grown in North America and a standard variety for french fries. Research into its early history challenged the later attribution of its origin to Colorado grower Lou D. Sweet in 1914.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russet_Burbank1909: Salaman finds blight resistance in wild potatoes
Redcliffe Salaman, a British physician turned geneticist, found blight-resistant seedlings among wild-derived potatoes in trials at his home in Barley, Hertfordshire, and from 1911 crossed the Mexican wild species Solanum demissum with cultivated potatoes. Resistance genes from S. demissum entered many European varieties, but new strains of the blight overcame each in turn, pushing breeders to seek more durable resistance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redcliffe_Salaman1967: Simplot agrees to supply McDonald's with frozen fries
The Idaho potato businessman J. R. Simplot agreed on a handshake with Ray Kroc, founder of the McDonald's Corporation, to supply frozen french fries, letting the chain serve the same russet potatoes all year; by 1972 all its fries were frozen. Simplot's company had developed commercial frozen fries from the late 1940s, building on the chemist Ray Dunlap's method of blanching potato strips before freezing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._Simplot1971: International Potato Center founded in Peru
The International Potato Center (CIP, from its Spanish name Centro Internacional de la Papa) was created through an agreement between Peru's government and North Carolina State University and opened in Lima in 1972 under its founding director, Richard Sawyer. Part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) network, it keeps a large genebank of native and wild potatoes and breeds varieties for developing countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Potato_Center1995: Monsanto introduces the genetically modified NewLeaf potato
NewLeaf potatoes carried a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that made them toxic to the Colorado potato beetle. They found only a small market, and Monsanto stopped selling the seed in 2001. Later engineered potatoes include the J. R. Simplot Company's Innate varieties, approved in the United States in 2014 and 2015, which bruise less and form less acrylamide when fried.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_potato#NewLeaf2008: UN marks the International Year of the Potato
Proposed by Peru and declared by the UN General Assembly in December 2005, the year was coordinated by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to promote the potato's role in food security. FAO reported that in 2005, for the first time, developing countries had grown more potatoes than developed ones, with most of the growth in China and India. In December 2023 the General Assembly also designated May 30 as the International Day of Potato.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Year_of_the_Potato2011: Consortium publishes the potato genome sequence
The Potato Genome Sequencing Consortium reported in Nature that it had assembled 86 percent of the 844-million-base-pair genome and predicted 39,031 protein-coding genes. To avoid the complexity of cultivated potatoes, which are highly heterozygous tetraploids, it sequenced a homozygous doubled-monoploid clone derived from an Andean diploid potato, giving breeders a reference genome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato2013: Herbarium genomes identify the famine's blight strain
Comparing genomes of Phytophthora infestans from 19th-century herbarium specimens with modern samples, an international team reported in the journal eLife that the famine-era epidemics were caused by a single lineage, named HERB-1, which persisted for more than 50 years before the related US-1 strain replaced it in the 20th century. Herbarium DNA studies by Jean Ristaino's group had shown in 2001 that the famine strain was not US-1, as once assumed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora_infestans#Origin_and_diversity2015: China promotes the potato as a staple food
China's Ministry of Agriculture announced a strategy to make the potato a staple food, promoting noodles, steamed bread and other foods in which potato flour replaces part of the wheat or rice flour. China was already the world's largest potato producer, but the anthropologist Jakob Klein found no evidence of a national surge in potato eating in the years that followed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_production_in_China2021: Chinese team breeds inbred lines for hybrid potatoes
Researchers led by Huang Sanwen reported in "Cell" that genome analysis helped them breed highly homozygous, fertile diploid potato lines whose crosses produced uniform, vigorous hybrids. The work advanced efforts to grow commercial potatoes from botanical seed instead of bulky seed tubers, offering a different route to breeding and distributing new varieties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato#Breeding2025: Genome study traces the potato to an ancient hybrid
Analyzing 128 genomes from potatoes and related plants, researchers led by Huang Sanwen, with colleagues including Sandra Knapp of London's Natural History Museum, reported in Cell that the potato lineage arose from hybridization between ancestors of the tomato and of the Etuberosum group, which does not form tubers, about 8 to 9 million years ago. Genes from both parent lineages proved crucial for tuber formation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato#Genetic_origins