Sweetpotato Video Resources and Growing Guide for Pacific Region Education and Research

Commodities

• Vegetables: sweet potatoes

Practices

• Crop Production: cropping systems
• Education and Training: extension
• Sustainable Communities: food sovereignty

The proposed project will create educational resources on sweetpotato production for agriculture professionals in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) and standard research protocols for researchers in the Pacific Islands.   

Farmers and gardeners in the PNW have expressed interest in growing sweetpotatoes but have found information from the internet to be misleading or flawed. Sweetpotatoes are a viable new storage crop that can provide a source of income for farmers throughout the year in the PNW, but production information is from the Southern United States, which has different environment conditions. PNW Extension educators lack complete region-appropriate resources to educate growers on the production and storage requirements to make sweetpotatoes a profitable and productive crop.   

Researchers within the Pacific Islands have requested assistance with creating standard protocols that would allow data from sweetpotato experiments to be compared as they work to optimize sweetpotato production throughout the Pacific Island region.   

A series of educational videos on sweetpotato production practices including slip production, planting techniques, input requirements, harvest timing, curing, and storage will be produced and dispersed to agricultural educators throughout the PNW and uploaded on WSU Extension websites for public viewing. An existing PNW growing guide will be updated to reflect farmer feedback and recent research. Factsheets and videos demonstrating standard research protocols and methods will be created and shared with colleagues researching sweetpotatoes in the Pacific Islands.   

Videos will be filmed with cell phone technology using an informal presentation style, to be more relatable to farmers and gardeners. Extension educators and volunteers, farmers and researchers will provide feedback for revision and additions to the guides and new factsheets and videos as applicable.   

1. Increase quality, relevance, accuracy, and usefulness of information on growing sweetpotatoes in the Pacific region available to Extension professionals and Master Gardener Volunteer community educators.  
2. Provide Extension professionals and Master Gardener volunteers with resources to teach farmers and home gardeners how to grow sweetpotatoes.
3. Increase farmers’ knowledge of how to grow sweetpotatoes in the Pacific region, including slip production and planting, variety selection, crop management, integrated pest management, harvest, curing and on-farm storage.
4. Promote farmer-to-farmer education of sweetpotato growing practices.  
5. Provide protocols to researchers for standardized methods for sweetpotato field trials.