There are a lot of good reasons to think of sweet potatoes in the fall.
There’s the timing. They’re harvested and cured and ready for market right about the time when the other fresh fruits and vegetables are finished for the year.
There’s the taste, so perfect with all those hearty winter dishes. The color, that pile of gold that seems made for fall. The nutrition, with all that beta carotene.
But this year, there’s an added incentive: Get them while they last. You may not know that North Carolina is the No. 1 state in sweet potato production, providing 40 percent of the nation’s supply. But if you did know that, you might have been looking toward all those flooded fields in Eastern North Carolina and wondering:
What’s happening to the sweet potatoes? Nothing good.
“We’ve got a serious situation,” says Sue Langdon, executive director of (British pound)the N.C. SweetPotato Commission.
Although loss estimates are still preliminary, both the commission and the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services say at least 50 percent of the crop is gone. And that figure could go up as farmers get back to the harvest.
“Thirteen to 15 inches of rain and sweet potatoes at this time of year don’t mix,” says Scott Bissette, a horticulture marketing specialist with the agriculture department. “They begin to sour and smell and they’re no good.”
Craig Hayes, a statistician with the agriculture department, says disaster reports predict a loss of $43.4 million, from a crop that brought in more than $57 million last year. Condition reports last week ranked 35 percent of fields as very poor, another 35 percent as poor, 18 percent as fair and only 12 as good.
“This is going to be one of those things we’re just going to have to wait and see. Even fields that got a little bit of water have soured,” Hayes says.
So what does that mean for consumers? Through the fall–and those big Thanksgiving and Christmas meals–there will be sweet potatoes, some from other states like Louisiana, which ranks second in production. And while prices might creep a little, officials don’t expect big jumps right away. The problem will come next spring and summer, when this fall’s small supply gets depleted.
