Researching Colocasia esculenta (aka Taro) in the Southeast as a Sustainable and Alternate Crop

View the project final report

Commodities

• Vegetables: taro

Practices

• Crop Production: crop improvement and selection, varieties and cultivars

This research project investigated taro (Colocasia esculenta) as a viable crop to be grown in Western North Carolina and beyond. Taro emerged as a crop that is easy to grow, has good yields, and can provide a low-input, climate-resilient alternative to other storage root crops. In addition, both the underground corms and the leaves are marketable harvests. This report provides an overview of our on-farm research project over the last three years, which includes our on-farm trials, broad collaboration with farmers who have grown taro, and chefs and culinarians who are helping to showcase taro within our regional food systems.    

Taro is a climate-resilient crop with high agronomic potential in the North Carolina food and farming system. Climate change is already a threat to growing food, with the severity of weather systems wreaking more regular farm and crop devastation in the South. This can occur in many forms but includes periods of drought, flooding due to intense rain events, and hail. In addition, a warming climate will leave ‘traditional’ crops less viable and fuel greater disease and pest pressure. These climate-related challenges will leave our current food systems less resilient to sudden shocks, resulting in potential supply chain disruptions for producers, distributors, and consumers, and will require adaptations to new growing conditions. The Union of Concerned Scientists wrote, “Farmers choose crop varieties and animal breeds that are well suited to local conditions. As those conditions shift rapidly over the coming decades, many farmers will be forced to rethink some of their choices.”

Our specific goal is to increase both the farmer and consumer awareness of taro as a viable, climate-resilient, and versatile crop in North Carolina. However, we also wish to recognize that taro has a long and diverse history as a domesticated food crop across many tropical regions of the world. Our work to grow taro in North Carolina aims to learn from a diverse network of farmers and chefs with authenticity and respect for the taro’s rich history, while also acknowledging that crops grown and consumed in new regions will adapt and meld in new and exciting ways.

Approach

Our approach to introducing taro as a mainstream crop in the Southeast is necessarily multi-leveled because there are many elements of a food system that need to be activated for the widespread adoption of a previously underutilized food source. At its core, our approach requires primary hands in the dirt research to fuel authentic and creative interaction with a community of engaged stakeholders. We pursued multiple interconnected projects to start showcasing taro more broadly to farmers and consumers. This included replicated yield trials, specific agronomic questions, but also broad farmer interviews, and utilizing the taro at culinary events. This approach allows farmers to confidently grow an emerging crop while building market demand for that crop. 

Method

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) has a long and rich history of cultivation in over 40 countries (1). Internally, we have grown 15 different cultivars as we learn the crop (see attached variety list). There are hundreds of accessions available across the world.

Y2-3: Multi-farm Variety Trial: Utopian Seed Project conducted two years of variety and yield trials to explore some of the available germplasm suitable for our region. Growing a wide diversity of cultivars allowed us to visually document these varieties. We also pay close attention to potential invasiveness of these cultivated taros, drawing a strong distinction between wild and cultivated forms of Colocasia esculenta. Our experience so far is that only certain landscaping taros spread aggressively.

Ongoing: Tasting and Culinary: In collaboration with Chef Terri Terrell, we will use the opportunity of growing multiple varieties for culinary evaluations and taro cooking events. It’s important that this type of engagement include chefs of different backgrounds who have cultural connections to taro. 

Y1-3: Farmer Experiences: We will work with farmers to grow taro in their production systems and follow up with interviews to assess their experience. We will document each farmer and use these as case studies in our outreach.  

Y2-3: Small Agronomic Trials to quantitatively answer some cultivation questions. We used ‘Korean Taro’ as a consistent variety because it is well known to us to assess the following questions:

• • The effect of plant spacing on yield
  • The effect of size-of-propagation material on yield 
  • The effect of leaf harvest on yield

These smaller trials answered some of the common questions we have for growing taro outside of the tropics. We have learned that some of the cultivation practices that have been researched previously simply don’t apply to our attempts at growing taro in Western NC and elsewhere in the upper Southeast.

1. Hard, L.-J. (2015, February 28). Everything You Need to Know About Taro. Food52. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://food52.com/blog/12375-everything-you-need-to-know-about-taro.