In many countries, taro is a staple, and it’s among the world’s oldest cultivated plants. In his mission to introduce taro to the Southeast, Smith is working with farmers, customers, and chefs alike - making an effort to cultivate taro and create a market for it. But that does little good for farmers if their customers don’t know how to eat it. And in the Southeastern U.S., tropical crops like taro look particularly attractive. In Kansas, as rainfall declines, cotton is flourishing in fields once dedicated to wheat and corn. Rising heat in Michigan, for instance, has prompted a boom in vineyards and widened the range of grape varieties that can be grown there, leading some to speculate that the Midwestern state could be the next wine hub. Courtesy of the Utopian Seed ProjectĪs temperatures rise and rainfall grows erratic, planting different crops is one way farmers can adapt to climate change. Now, they start the seedlings in mid-April, or directly sow offshoots of the mother plant into the ground, deep enough to withstand any late frosts.Ī taro seedling before planting. Smith and his team have kept tinkering with taro, as part of their wider effort to diversify farming - work that would not only make the food system more resilient to climate change, they thought, but also more delicious. But even North Carolina’s relatively mild winters aren’t taro-friendly. In the tropics, the starchy, lavender-hued root vegetable is grown year-round. “That was a fail,” said Smith, the founder of the nonprofit Utopian Seed Project. Their heart-shaped leaves crowded the small greenhouse, but it was too early to transplant them into the still-cold ground. Within a month, the taro had sprung up a foot and a half. He’d started them in a heated greenhouse one February day a few years ago, thinking the tropical crop would need plenty of time to establish. The first time Chris Smith tried to grow taro on his experimental farm in western North Carolina, the plants were too eager.
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February 2023
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