Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Hunting for a New Cash Crop
As Immigrant Populations Grow, Small Farms Turn to Ethnic Foods
By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 12, 2005; B01

Israel Hertzler isn't the sort of man who usually bucks tradition. On
the rare occasions when the Amish farmer leaves his home on dusty
Woodpecker Way, he drives a horse and buggy. He is partial to straw hats
with wide brims and homemade trousers held up by worn suspenders. And
for lunch most days? Meat and potatoes, of course.
So Hertzler was more than a bit leery when a businessman from Mali asked
him three years ago to plant n'goyo , a bitter type of African eggplant
with green ridges, in a part of Southern Maryland better known for
tobacco barns and oyster-shucking houses.
"I said to him, 'You must be funny,' " said Hertzler, 32, of St. Mary's
County. "I don't know the first thing about growing African eggplants."
But he does now. Hertzler and his brother have transformed their patch
of Amish country into a United Nations of horticulture. Down the road
from the half-acre of n'goyo grows another type of eggplant, known as
njilu in the Congo Republic. Nearby is a plot of habanero peppers,
highly prized in Latin America.
The patches of international vegetables are the latest example of how
immigrants moving into the Washington region are reshaping the economy.
As growing enclaves of ethnic groups, from Salvadorans to Ethiopians,
hunger for fresh produce from their homelands, increasing numbers of
farmers like Hertzler are trying to meet their needs.
The eagerness of some farmers to cast away traditional crops and turn
instead to vegetables with names difficult for English speakers to
pronounce underscores a growing desperation in the agricultural
community, in which longtime growers are struggling to stay afloat.
Faced with falling crop prices and rising operating costs, more and more
area farmers are accepting multimillion-dollar offers from developers
and getting out of agriculture. Across the region, fields of tobacco and
soybeans are giving way to a new crop: sprawling subdivisions.
But on quiet Lomax Road in Charles County, Lana Edelen is determined to
keep her farm going. Part of the key to her success? The mix of ethnic
fruits and vegetables she sells to Jamaicans, Latinos, Asians and
Africans. Down past the rusty tobacco barns and rows of sweet corn,
Edelen drives from patch to patch in a gray station wagon caked with
mud.
She points at a green leaf known as callalou to Jamaicans. Then the
Asian variety of eggplant known as ichiban . But Edelen runs into some
trouble when she tries to describe a spherical yellow vegetable speckled
with white. She calls it a garden egg.
"I don't know how you say it in their language because I don't speak
it," said the 54-year-old former tobacco farmer. "I just know Africans
like to eat it."
When she has to write down the vegetable's name, she writes it
phonetically: B-O-M-A. Yao Afantchao, a Togolese immigrant who buys her
vegetables and distributes them to local specialty stores, tries to
correct her.
"He says, 'That's not the way it's supposed to be spelled. It's supposed
to start with an H. And I say, 'Well, that's the way I spell it,' "
Edelen said, looking exasperated. "What's the point of having an H if
it's silent?"
The bitter-tasting vegetable is actually spelled gboma by West Africans.
Afantchao is just pleased that the Edelens, whose ancestors farmed
tobacco for generations, tried a new and exotic crop.
Afantchao is on a crusade to increase the number of local farmers
growing ethnic vegetables. He and Stephan Tubene, a Congolese immigrant
who runs the Small Farm Institute at the University of Maryland and its
fields in Upper Marlboro, started working together in the 1990s when
they realized that immigrants craved the fresh produce they ate in their
homelands.
"My kids can eat the fast food Monday through Sunday, but I can't," said
Tubene, 43, of Glen Burnie. "I need to eat my fufu or my egusi ."
He's not the only one with a hankering for fufu (a type of African
porridge) or egusi (ground melon seeds used as seasoning). Ethnic foods
are part of the $25 billion specialty food industry, whose sales jumped
16 percent between 2002 and 2004, according to the National Association
for the Specialty Food Trade.
So the two Africans began researching which tropical vegetables could
best be grown in the soil around Washington. In December, Tubene
published the 20-page first edition of the "Ethnic and Specialty
Vegetables Handbook." They constantly tell growers about this burgeoning
market.
On a recent sun-baked afternoon at an Upper Marlboro research farm, a
few dozen curious farmers showed up at the quarter-acre plot to gaze at
the unusual produce. Tubene held up what looked like a watermelon
shrunken to the size of a golf ball.
"Anybody recognize this?" he said.
The farmers looked puzzled. " Tomatinas ?" someone finally guessed.
"They are eggplants!" Tubene declared. "The Thai variety."
Some farmers are skeptical of growing plants they've never heard of. But
Christine Bergmark, director of the Southern Maryland Agricultural
Development Commission, said she anticipates more growers will turn to
ethnic vegetables if they can do it profitably.
"You've got to remember that Southern Maryland was founded on a crop
that no one knew much about: tobacco," she said. "That was a new, novel
crop back then. But it worked pretty well for almost 400 years."
Although there are no precise statistics measuring the number of farmers
growing ethnic vegetables, experts say the number is steadily
increasing. Immigrants also are starting to grow their own vegetables.
The New York-based National Immigrant Farming Initiative estimates that
60 percent of farm workers in the United States are foreign-born.
Haroun Hallack, 39, who was born in Sierra Leone, grows ethnic
vegetables on his farm in West Virginia. He sells to customers
throughout the Washington region who want their African produce fresh,
not canned or imported.
"We cannot satisfy the demand," he said.
As he toils in his St. Mary's field, Hertzler doesn't give much thought
to the culinary preferences of West Africans. He grew n'goyo for a year
before he tried it, and he doesn't plan on cooking it again.
"They don't actually taste good," he said. "I gave it to people, and
they said it was terrible."
But as he took a bite of a tennis ball-size n'goyo on a recent morning,
Hertzler noticed something strangely appealing about the vegetable,
picked fresh in the field. It may not be sweet like an apple, he said,
but there's something about it that makes you want to keep chewing.
"I'm not sure that I like it," Hertzler said, taking another bite. "But
I'm going to keep eating it."
C 2005 The Washington Post Company