As NC warms, one farm is turning to a tropical crop: Taro

Added on 09 July 2022

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As NC warms, one farm is turning to a tropical crop: Taro

The first time Chris Smith tried to grow taro on his experimental farm in western North Carolina, the plants were too eager. He'd started them in a heated greenhouse one February day a few years ago, thinking the tropical crop would need plenty of time to establish. Within a month, the taro had sprung up a foot and a half. Their heart-shaped leaves crowded the small greenhouse, but it was too early to transplant them into the still-cold ground. "That was a fail," said Smith, the founder of the nonprofit Utopian Seed Project.

In the tropics, the starchy, lavender-hued root vegetable is grown year-round. But even North Carolina's relatively mild winters aren't taro-friendly. Smith and his team have kept tinkering with taro, as part of their wider effort to diversify farming work that would not only make the food system more resilient to climate change, they thought, but also more delicious. Now, they start the seedlings in mid-April, or directly sow offshoots of the mother plant into the ground, deep enough to withstand any late frosts.

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