It’s the year nobody ever dreamed of, but thanks to good weather and healthy retail sales, sweet potato growers appear to be adapting well to their new world.
While retail produce sales are up nearly 13%, Kay Rentzel, executive director of the U.S. Sweet Potato Council in Dillsburg, Pa., said the shutdown of restaurants, foodservice and schools wiped out 34% of the market for sweet potatoes.
“It’s been nice to be included in Farmers to Families food boxes,” Rentzel said, “but like every other fresh product we are learning to rebalance and rework the marketplace.”
In North Carolina, the country’s leading sweet potato producer, the 2020 crop is “looking great,” said Rebecca Scott, grower accounting and marketing director at Nash Produce, Nashville N.C.
That’s despite prolonged heat waves and a brush with Hurricane Isaias, which brought much-needed rain without harming the crop, Scott said.
“We’ve increased our acreage for both conventional and organic varieties to accommodate the rise in demand,” she said. “Our growers expect to begin harvesting around the end of August or early September.”
After a challenging Mississippi season, with rain during planting and cooler temperatures in mid-May, Marshall Bailey, partner at Bruce Sweet Potato Inc., said he’s looking at a fair crop.
“We expect to transition to the new crop around the middle of September,” said Bailey, based in Bruce, Miss.
Joe Edmondson, co-owner of Topashaw Farms in Vardaman, Miss., said excess water in early July didn’t hurt his young plants, and he plans to start digging his 2,800 acres of sweet potatoes the last week of August.
“Our goal is to be through the end of October,” said Edmondson. “We have additional workers coming the first of October to make sure we finish on time.”
He expects his 2019 crop to last until mid-October and said his retail sales in August are getting close to last year’s numbers after dropping 20% in April and May. His processing business, from sweet potato fries to wedges and baby food, also appears to be coming back.
“It’s looking better now compared to what it was a month or so after the virus hit,” he said.
Autumn Campbell, sales manager at Matthews Ridgeview Farms, Wynne, Ark., said 2020 is looking better than last year, when 600 acres were left unharvested.
“We should go cured to cured pretty easily and may end up packing a small percentage of our fresh crop early,” Campbell said.
Bailey and other growers saw retail movement increase at the beginning of the pandemic as people scrambled to stock up on food, but his processed potato movement has dropped as restaurants closed or saw their capacity reduced by 50%.
“We will definitely feel the effects of this during the upcoming crop,” he said.
In Glennville, Ga., Bland Farms president Delbert Bland was looking forward to harvesting his first crop in two years.
“We’ve had favorable weather this summer and the crop looks good,” said Bland, who expected to start harvesting his 500 acres in mid- to late August and finish by late October.
Matt Garber, partner in Garber Farms, Iota, La., said he was running out of 2019 crop and will “very soon” be offering new crop sweet potatoes.
“The 2020 crop is good at the moment,” he said in late July, “but we cannot count it until it’s in the barn.”
Rene Simon, director of the Louisiana Sweet Potato Commission, said the lack of farmers growing sweet potatoes in the state has become a real concern. Louisiana’s acreage is down to about 7,500 acres, said Simon, about half of what it was 12 years ago, as growers switch to less intensive crops with fewer financial risks.
At Bruce, Bailey said many core employees couldn’t help with planting due to the border uncertainties.
“Our local packinghouse labor has been a constant struggle,” he said, “a combination of hefty government unemployment benefits and the actual virus itself. We have obviously tightened our belts on food safety and the safety of the employees who have chosen to work and we have implemented all new procedures from start to finish.”
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