Todd O’Neal is a sweet potato farmer in Louisiana and his enthusiasm for the crop is electric. He talks to us about how sweet potatoes were considered something for poor people, as small farmers always had a patch to feed their family. But recently, the crop has been better understood as flavorful, nutritious and versatile. Todd talks to us for our holiday foods series about the ins and outs of growing them as well as give us his tip on the best way to enjoy sweet potatoes.

Todd is with Black Gold Farms, you can connect with them on online:

• On the Web: https://blackgoldfarms.com/
• Like Them on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlackGoldFarms/
• Connect with Them on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/black-gold-farms/

Watch Todd talk growing sweet potatoes this season with the team at This Week in Louisiana Agriculture.

Sweet Potatoes are now grown & enjoyed 12 months out of the year! It’s no longer just a holiday thing!

Did you know that the “regular potatoes” you think of are often called “white potatoes” or “Irish Potatoes?”

The Curing Process in Sweet potatoes: Regular/white/Irish potatoes are brought inside to an environment to cool. Sweet potatoes on the other hand are heated up to help break down the sugars inside the sweet potato which makes it “sweet”.

The biggest time of the year for sweet potato farmers? Thanksgiving! Holidays are big in general. Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter are all big times for sweet potatoes. But they have been gaining ground and are now enjoyed year round!

Why are sweet potatoes so popular? At one time every farmer grew sweet potatoes but there was a steady decline as farming numbers dwindled. At one time, sweet potatoes were somehow aligned with people “being poor” and so they fell off the general chart of attention span. In just the last decade, sweet potatoes have gained attention momentum, being associated with a general focus on health, being offered as solutions to many people with a variety of dietary needs including those who are diabetic and take take on the starches that are provided in the Regular/White/Irish Potato.They are high in Vitamin A & Beta Carotene.

It’s in the bag, man: When COVID-19 began gripping the US, there was a swell in sales of sweet potatoes (and all general foods that could be purchased/acquired at grocery stores). Todd also noticed something strange in a photo of a grocery store’s produce area – the only things left were “loose apples” which helped to craft a new plan to help the sale of sweet potatoes. It was clear that people were grabbing things in a BAG, because people were paying attention to how many surfaces were touched by how many people.

There’s only ONE kind of sweet potato, right? There are many varieties of sweet potatoes – The Bayou Belle: It’s not the prettiest potato but makes for great sweet potato fries! The Orleans sweet potato is the pretty one for fresh market handsome go to processors and there is a lesser known type – The Beauregard – all of which were developed and named – clearly – from their development at Louisiana State’s Sweet Potato Research Station.

The Count Matters – Which state tops sweet potato production? Wondering who is on top of the “sweet potatoes heap? North Carolina currently grows the most. Mississippi is in the second slot. California comes in third, and Louisiana takes the number 4 slot.

Lookin’ Mighty Fine (For a sweet potato…): Todd is SURE, (not because he lives and has a sweet potato farm there or anything) that Louisiana Potatoes LOOK the best of all available sweet potatoes.

What makes these so great? Silt loam soils!

Silt is a solid, dust-like sediment that water, ice, and wind transport and deposit. Silt is made up of rock and mineral particles that are larger than clay but smaller ..

Loam is a special type of soil that has been formulated to contain a mixture of sand, silt and clay. Sandy loam soil is a very desirable medium that is used by farmers, gardeners, landscapers and property owners because of its very beneficial qualities.

You can learn more about the passion for soil in this conversation with Mr. Ray Young that’s mentioned.

Did You Know: A sweet potato will cure in 4-5 days in general, but depends a bit on time of year, temperature and humidity.

Some Like It Hot – But Not Wet: 85% humidity and nice cool temperatures (55 degrees or so) is best to put sweet potatoes “to sleep” to help prevent CO2 levels form climbing too high that would cause the sweet potatoes to rot. They also like dry environments like Shay told us onions do…

Smart Buildings Help Feed People? Huh? Sweet potato farmers often use buildings that detect how much CO2 is building up to help prevent unfavorable conditions!

The Root of the Matter: A sweet potato is a root. It’s part of the morning glory family – it’s a WEED! It has the same type of flowers you may have seen in a vining garden.

SORRY! You’re Going to Have to Listen to This Episode to Find Out… The process of growing and cultivating sweet potatoes is incredibly detailed! Be sure to listen to this episode of Grounded By The Farm to understand all of it! Thanks, Todd!

Big Machines – Beautiful sweet potatoes – ACTION! Interested in seeing ALL of the sweet potato farming machines in action? “Dig It!”

https://youtu.be/EGFo3bZj_SM

Planting sweet potatoes takes 40-50 days! Harvesting is probably 75 days of the year!

Ready to learn more about “H2A Workers”? Be sure to check out The Grounded By the Farm episode on growing peppers for more details!

Counting Workers to Help Make It COUNT! Did you know that the Black Gold Farm location that Todd supervises, has almost 300 employees? Feeding people requires hard work and they truly enjoy their effort knowing that it will put food on the plates of many people!

You Say “Yam” But They Say “Sweet Potato” — What’s the Story? Are Yams and sweet potatoes the SAME THING? As much as we want you to read and then know the answer, you’re going to have to listen to this episode of Grounded By The Farm with Todd O’Neal from Black Gold sweet potato farm to find out! Suffice it to say, Louisiana is marketing smart!

Finding sweet potatoes near you! The market for sweet potatoes has grown sometimes due to food services and restaurants.

• Do you know what a QSR is? It’s an acronym that in this case stands for Quick Serve Restaurant!
• Do you know what an LTO is? It’s an acronym that in this case stands for Limited Time Offer!
• What does YOUR favorite “QSR” offer as an “LTO?” Tell us PDQ, or you’ll be SOL, and end up doing KP and if you’re in the we’ll surely all end up DOA!

Curious about ONIONS? Be sure to check out the episode of Grounded By The Farm featuring onion farmer that’s so good it’ll make you CRY! https://groundedbythefarm.com/growing-onions/

Black Gold offers value added & bulk sweet potatoes! There are so many innovations that go beyond individual sweet potatoes or bags, doing poly-wrapped and more. Fresh at the grocery really went up when more people stayed at home, but the company also offers them in bulk of 40 pounds at their Delhi, Louisiana location.

How does a sweet potato farmer prefer to eat a sweet potato? First it gets peeled. Then you warm up a seasoned cast iron skillet. Slice the sweet potato length-wise. Toss in half a stick of butter and brown it up on both sides – sprinkle a little salt on it and you’re there! He’s had sweet potato biscuits, sweet potato cakes and more! What’s YOUR favorite kind of sweet potato preparation? Contact us via The Grounded By The Farm’s social media and tell us what yours is!

The Struggle is REAL: Sweet potatoes WITH or WITHOUT – PECANS? That’s a controversy

Storing them at home — keep them in a cool, dark place. Heat is the enemy that causes it to put sprouts on and it changes the texture inside.

Stick It – In The Window! Even Todd grows sweet potatoes in his window sill! Have you tried to be a sweet potato farmer? He gives the instructions on how to do it inside this episode! Listen, Learn, Grow and EAT!

We Need to Hear from You! 

What did YOU find interesting about this episode of Grounded by The Farm? What would you like us to be sure we include in the second season of the podcast? Tell Janice what you thought about it now and we just may use your feedback on a future episode

The team at EditorCorps.com helped with show notes and editing of this episode.

The post Sweet Potato Farmer Todd O’Neal Is Feeling the Love as Sweet Potatoes Grow in Favor appeared first on Grounded by the Farm.

As someone who craves crawfish and spends a lot of time plotting how I will get access to the good stuff since I currently live in the Midwest, I am a natural for finding an excuse to get to crawfish ponds. And luckily I have friends who were willing to help make that happen while I was in Louisiana. I was giddy. Giddy for days. Bill & Janice Cheek probably weren’t sure what hit them!

From the road, crawfish ponds look like a rice field but very few rice fields are flooded this time of year. So I have driven by a bunch and have wondered what I should look for, but without a farmer on tap to explain, I kept driving. Bill did a great job of talking through things and we captured some of that on video.

A Tough Spring

Spring 2019 was a rough one for farmers in several areas and that included Lebeau, Louisiana where Bill produces crawfish. That wet spring not only kept him from planting the rice he normally would, it kept him from getting his backup crop of sudangrass planted too! So he decided to go ahead with natural vegetation as the feed.

The process of putting out traps and working a boat in the shallow ponds remains intriguing, but Bill’s explanation of cutting trails into the field before he flooded it with water made absolute sense.

The number of birds I saw was amazing. And Bill’s stories about the others took things up a notch further! But it was probably the explanation of the crawfish reproductive cycle that left me truly in awe… but when Janice teted me photos… well, I can’t show them to enough people! I mean to see a crawfish with eggs or baby crawfish attached to the underneath of a tail? That’s mindblowing! And they make it out of mud burrows with that? Dang. Check them out!

The post Trails, Birds & Burrows Get Attention at Crawfish Ponds appeared first on Grounded by the Farm.

This bonus episodes provides a bit of background on the show’s host Janice Person, the way she got into agriculture and memories of a first farmer interview decades ago.

As the launch of the show began to near, it became clear that connecting back to Mr Ray Young — the first farmer I (Janice) ever interviewed — just seemed to make sense.

Mr Ray and his wife Mrs. Dorothy welcomed me into their home and as he and I laughed and talked, I turned on the microphone to explain a bit of the project and to get his grounding once again.

We talked about the various areas of research he worked in over the decades, but he stays pretty low key despite my knowing he was a great pioneer and innovator! His deep love of the soil, his commitment to improving it, that is something to admire. 

Thanks to great people like Mr. Ray, I am Grounded by the Farm.

Learn more about the show at https://groundedbythefarm.com and go along with Mr. Ray and I as we look at his farm, and take a much closer look at soils in this post https://groundedbythefarm.com/mr-ray-young/

The post How I Got Here & A Convo with Mr. Ray Young (The First Farmer I Interviewed) appeared first on Grounded by the Farm.

Over the years, I have no idea how many times I have told the story of the first farm I ever visited, the first farmer I interviewed — Mr. Ray Young. I do know it was part of a storytelling session I did a couple of years ago.

That first visit was decades ago and although I had been back several times, it seemed that it had been far too long since I had visited Wisner, Louisiana. Luckily Mr. Ray (that’s what everyone calls him) and his wife Mrs. Dorothy were able to get me on their calendars! Mr. Ray turns 90 later this month, but that hasn’t slowed them down much. They were still doing a lot in their community and of course at home. They are also some of the sweetest people on the planet.

As I do some of the farm visits, I am finding local restaurants and stores that I may highlight, but the Youngs cook so well we stayed in! In fact, when I arrived, they had tenderloin & blackeyed peas and cornbread cooking but were waiting for me to get there to fry up the green tomatoes (in cottonseed oil of course!) Have mercy it was a great meal!

The next morning, after we did the podcast recording, we hopped in his truck and went out to see the farm. He shared some of the stories on how he came to buy a farm here and there over the years as well as the reason he stopped plowing in the spring, planting his cotton directly into a seedbed he’d make in the fall. It is one of several conservation tillage practices farmers choose from now, but in the 1980s and early 90s, Mr. Ray was pioneering the practice. In the decades since, he’s not only been able to plant crops more timely but has been able to build organic matter and soil health significantly.

We don’t talk about food much while we’re in the field, but his love of the land is similar to what I’ve seen on hundreds if not thousands of farms over the years…. and that impacts our food in massive ways!

He points out the quick changes in soils in northeastern Louisiana, how his focus on building soils has improved the farms he and his son Jesse work and more. The excitement he shows for improved organic matter in soils shows a career well spent and a passion that continues as he turns 90 this month!

The post Deep into Soil Conservation with Mr. Ray Young appeared first on Grounded by the Farm.

When I interviewed Bill & Janice Cheek about their crawfish farm, it was done on location at Stelly’s Restaurant in Lebeau, Louisiana. (It’s confusing to me, Janice Person to write about another Janice, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it.) Stelly’s is definitely memorable!

I was glad Bill mentioned that Janice’s family started the cafe, store and gas station when we talked by phone. See I arrived ahead of them and went on in. Gotta say the gators on the wall grabbed my attention! However when the Cheeks arrived, getting their attention was tough… seemed everyone who crossed their paths wanted to catch up!

We met inside the restaurant, the grocery store was next door. And we actually took a seat alongside what I later learned was Janice’s family dinner table when she was growing up. Her family was a big one and the table made room for all the siblings. I couldn’t help but grab a photo of it along with the wall of deer hunting trophies, cooking supplies, pots and pans, etc. There are even photos of the original owners — Janice’s grandparents!

The family’s farming side was also represented as a crawfish trap hung from the ceiling!

There was a steady stream of people coming in, many coming in from a morning of deer hunting. People took time to say hello, study up on the menu, etc. I decided to go with the shrimp po-boy and have to tell you I loved it!

Although I have to say that Stelly’s is really unique, the sense of community there is amazingly familiar as so many small towns around the United States have cafes that offer a homebase of sorts for locals. Finding that as I travel is always something I enjoy too!

The post Taking a Quick Look at Stelly’s appeared first on Grounded by the Farm.