Editing Trofim Lysenko (section)

===Summer potato planting===
In the southern regions of the Soviet Union, vegetatively propagated potatoes gradually produced increasingly smaller tubers, which, in addition, were subject to severe rotting. To combat this, Lysenko proposed summer planting of potatoes, arguing that the "deterioration of the breed" of potatoes can be stopped by planting them not in warm, but in cool soil, at the end of summer.<ref name="Soifer"/><ref name="washniil"/>

On 11 January 1941, in a lecture given at the [[Polytechnic Museum]], Lysenko stated:<ref>{{cite web | title=Т. Д. Лысенко «Агробиология» | website=Организм и среда (1943) | url=https://imichurin.narod.ru/lysenko/agrobiology_19.html | language=ru | access-date=2024-05-13}}</ref>
{{blockquote|Previously, it was common knowledge that if, under comparable conditions, planting material of at least the Early Rose variety, obtained from the harvest of the Moscow region, and planting material of the same variety, but obtained from the harvest of the Odessa region, are planted, then almost without exception, the yield of planting material from the Moscow region will always be significantly greater than the yield of planting material from the Odessa region. Now we can cite a lot of experimental data of the opposite order. And in the past, 1940, in the experiments of {{ill|Ivan Glushchenko|ru|Глущенко, Иван Евдокимович}} (research associate at the Institute of Genetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences) on a site near Moscow, a crop of potatoes of the Early Rose variety was obtained from tubers of summer southern reproduction (Breeding and Genetics Institute, Odessa) 480.5 centners per hectare, and under the same conditions the same variety of local origin (Moscow region, Institute of Potato Farming) yielded a yield of 219.5 centners per hectare. All this suggests that summer planting potatoes in the south is not a way to stop the degeneration of the potato breed, but a way to improve the potato breed.}}

However, as with vernalization, data was collected using questionnaires, making the results easy to falsify, and any scientific data obtained was never published. When summer planting did not produce any positive results, Lysenko suggested burying the harvested potatoes in trenches, spreading a layer of soil over a layer of potatoes, arguing that this would reduce losses from rotting tubers. However, burying tubers in trenches led to huge crop losses, as the rotting of the tubers only intensified.<ref name="Soifer"/>

Lysenko ignored the real reason for the degeneration of potato plantings - potato viruses (a particularly large role in the degeneration is played by the [[potato leafroll virus]] - PLRV, [[potato virus X]] - PVX, and [[potato virus Y]] - PVY), replacing it with abstract ideas about the "deterioration of the potato breed".<ref name="Soifer"/> Ignoring the role of viruses in the degeneration of potato plantings and the subsequent ban on research into plant viruses led to a significant delay in the development of methods for detecting plant viruses in the Soviet Union, the spread of viruses not only in the south, but also in other regions of the Soviet Union, and, as a result, to a sharp drop in potato yields.<ref name="Soifer"/>