This past Thanksgiving, I was on a quest to re-create an earthy, family-style potato dish that I’d tried a few weeks earlier — a recipe that centered on a sweet potato like no other I’ve ever tasted.
That sweet potato was the Hayman, brought to the South in the 1850s from the West Indies. Despite its delicately sweet flavor, its gnarly exterior and greenish-white interior win no beauty contests when put next to the big orange sugar bombs of today, not to mention it’s more labor-intensive to grow.
The precious 5 pounds of Eastern Shore Haymans that I acquired at St. Stephen’s Farmers Market came through connections plied by the sage Powhatan farmers Bill and India Cox of Casselmonte Farm.
Slow Food USA has placed the Hayman in its Ark of Taste, a catalog of endangered heritage foods. Its catalog entry specifically mentions the Eastern Shore’s William Harmon, who described the cultivation of that sweet potato in an interview. Harmon, who has grown Haymans all his life, as did his father and grandfather, preserves “his stock every year by cutting slips from producing plants and planting them in special rows designated for seed,” which he continues to share. I, no doubt, benefited from his family’s preservation of this potato.
I share my Hayman quest because it amplifies the importance of Tricycle Gardens’ new Urban Agricultural Fellowship program that Dina Weinstein writes about this month.
As our nation’s farmers age and their numbers decrease, the sharing of their technical knowledge with aspiring younger farmers, whether they plan to grow on urban plots or country acreage, is imperative.
Tricycle’s program — the first USDA-certified initiative of its kind in the country — is prescient, especially as one considers the results of the 2017 National Young Farmer Survey of more 3,500 farmers, former farmers and aspiring farmers under 40, which was released in November.
The survey highlights the significant challenges those under 40 face, including land acquisition and student debt. “As policymakers sit down to write our next farm bill, I hope they pay attention to these survey findings,” says George Washington University’s Kathleen Merrigan, who assisted with the research. “If nothing more is done to help transition young people into American agriculture, we will be importing all our food.”
