Southern crops come to the Midwest

Friday, April 4, 2014

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. And when temperatures soar and it doesn't rain for weeks, you stop planting corn and you start growing okra.

That's what many farmers in the U.S. Midwest are doing, according to Aljazeera America. Some growers in Kansas are producing 1,200 pounds of okra a week, and farmers in Wisconsin are planting it, too.

Other Southern crops are creeping northward as well. "We're seeing the expansion of cotton into the Midwest," says Charles Rice, chair of the International Union of Soil Sciences. "It's already in the southern tier of Kansas."  

Sorghum, which can handle heat and water stress better than corn, is being planted all over Kansas. Some 2,750,000 acres of sorghum were planted in 2013, compared to 650,000 acres in 2012.

"It's because of the climate, and it's also because of economic opportunities," says Jerry Hatfield, a laboratory director at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "Farmers are opportunistic, and they're entrepreneurial. They've discovered there's a market for okra and you can profitably grow that crop." As for corn, Hatfield says it's moving to North and South Dakota.

Courtney Skeeba, a Kansas farmer who started growing okra after her sustainable tomatoes kept succumbing to heat stress, says her customers are warming up to okra, too. "We constantly sell out of the okra that we bring to the market. Even though it's not a Midwest food in general, something is changing because, by the end of the day, it's gone." BF