While some crops suffered through hot, dry weather, Mississippi’s sweet potato crop largely got rain at all the right times and hopes are high for a good crop.
Lorin Harvey, sweet potato specialist with the Mississippi State University Extension Service, said harvest began the last week of August.
“It’s a strong looking crop, but you can never really tell until you start digging,” Harvey said. “We got timely rains, which will probably be the biggest factor for this year’s success.”
Mississippi is known nationally for its sweet potato crop, and this year, farmers planted about 35,800 acres of it, an increase of almost 10%.
“That’s a pretty big jump in the world of Mississippi sweet potatoes,” Harvey said, noting that the crop is up nearly 25% in the last five years.
“I attribute this year’s acreage increase to a combination of last year’s poor crop yields, which resulted in high demand and higher prices, and the abysmal prices of most other commodities,” Harvey said. “It’s a lot easier to justify growing more acres of sweet potatoes when it’s just about the only thing that makes money.”
Planting season is an involved process for sweet potatoes, but it went fairly smoothly this year. As with many row crops, sweet potatoes benefit from an early planting date.
“Over the last five years, you can see a pretty clear decline in plant survival in fields that were planted after about June 12,” Harvey said. “That’s usually when the rain slows down and temperatures start to ramp up.”
This year, many farmers were able to get into the fields in late April and took advantage of cooler temperatures that let the plants get established before the summer heat.
“We had a string of rainfall there at the end of April to the beginning of May that pushed planting back for many,” he said. “It didn’t cause too many hiccups because we were still able to increase acreage.”
Caleb Englert farms 178 acres of sweet potatoes in Chickasaw County and is president of the Mississippi Sweet Potato Council. He agreed that the crop looked good headed into harvest.
“There is good potential to have a good, average crop,” Englert said. “We had some decent rains, some dry spells late in the growing season, and heat came in and damaged a few fields of later planted sweet potatoes. But overall, if things keep going like they are, we’ll have a nice little average crop.”
Englert owns Englert Farms in Houston, and said it will be early November before all the sweet potatoes are harvested.
The biggest recent challenge has been slow processing of H-2A permits, the work permits needed for the migrant workers who harvest Mississippi’s crop.
“There was some slow processing at the border trying to get them here in time,” Englert said.
Harvey said sweet potatoes finally caught some breaks this year after suffering very high input prices, unsustainably high H-2A wage rates and multiple years of drought.
“Farmers are pretty optimistic going into this harvest, and frankly I am, too,” he said. “Pricing is still higher than normal due to last year’s short crop, so I know many are hoping to take advantage of that pricing while it lasts.”
This article is a product of the Mississippi State University Extension Service, the off-campus education arm of Mississippi State University that provides current research and educational information to individuals in all 82 counties.
