I was homesick alone for Thanksgiving and always trying to think up ways to make money. I decided to copy the Vidalia Onions guy by selling Mississippi Sweet Potatoes directly to consumers online. I read his blog post “I sell onions on the internet” several years ago and have always wondered if I could do that with Mississippi Sweet Potatoes. So I spent my lonesome holiday creating a website and running a Google Ad campaign to see if there was anybody who wants to buy sweet potatoes online.

I am basically drop shipping sweet potatoes and I have weird feelings about this. You can see the store here: www.sweetclay.net.

A very funny manifestation of homesickness: First shipment of Mississippi Sweet Potatoes

I grew up in Mississippi eating sweet potatoes grown in Vardaman, Mississippi, aka The Sweet Potato Capital of the World. The early farmers named it that and it stuck so nobody else could claim it. A self-invented mythology. The state grows the third largest amount of sweet potatoes in the United States. Everybody in Mississippi swears they’re the best. I don’t know if “The Sweet Potato Capital of the World” has any recognition outside of the south or farming/food people, but I wanted to use that as the basis for my shop.

After storing the sweet potatoes for myself, I realize how this would’ve been the perfect crop for this area before we had electricity. Sweet potatoes require 55-60 degree with high humidity, and the fall sweet potato harvest would’ve happened around the same time that the changing season brings this weather to the area. Also the season brings the occasional warm spells which would’ve helped cure them.

This is one of the boxes that the farmers use, an image stamped onto my brain after a lifetime of living around it: Mississippi Sweet Potatoes Farmers box

Mississippi Sweet Potatoes

Locals say they’ll last a long time if you keep the dirt on them.

I created the e-commerce website on Shopify. I listed only one product: Organic Beauregard Sweet Potatoes from the Sweet Potato Capital of The World. An e-commerce store with one single product looked sad, so I listed more organic varieties. I thought, yeah of course the Sweet Potato Capital of the World will have all of the varieties under the sun, and I listed four different varieties for sale.

I considered cold calling sweet potato farmers with the idea before ever launching a website, hoping that they would be interested in being the supplier. I wanted to find a farm who would ship them for me because I currently live in Vermont which is very far away from Mississippi. This is the basic arrangement that the Vidalia Onion Guy has for his shop.

I figured that a farmer would be more willing to work with me if I had some existing orders and money in hand. I decided to go ahead and make a website and try to get some sales before finding a partner farm. I ran Google Ads for 3 weeks and made almost $1k in revenue. People bought all of the varieties that I listed on the shop. These first customers were consumers who wanted high quality organic sweet potatoes but couldn’t find them locally. I also discovered an interesting B2B market.

I was excited but now I had to source the specialty sweet potato varieties. I timed everything so that I could fill the orders when I travelled back home. I thought it would be very easy to find a wide variety of organic sweet potatoes in The Sweet Potato Capital of the World, especially after seeing the abundance of organic sweet potato varieties available at grocery stores in Vermont.

I was wrong!

Before contacting the big sweet potato farmers, I hit up some of the small farmers I know. I emailed Will Reed at Native Son in Tupelo. He was one of the first farmers in Mississippi to start an organic CSA farm and he knows everybody. He didn’t have enough crop to supply me but he told me to call the organic sweet potato farmer Caleb Englert. “He has a good crop,” Will said.

I already knew about that farmer. I read about him in a recent issue of the Mississippi Market Bulletin, the monthly newspaper that reports on Mississippi’s agriculture economy. They published a front page piece about Mississippi sweet potatoes to align with the fall harvest. He’s a major organic grower in Vardaman and the President of the Mississippi Sweet Potato Council. Based on the article, this farmer seemed like the ideal person to work with.

I called him and heard his thick Calhoun County accent that I hadn’t heard in probably a year. It took a second for my brain to remember how to understand. I have an accent but it ain’t that thick, and it decays each day that I don’t live in the south. He interrupted me and was like, “Sorry I was getting in the truck and the bluetooth always messes it up.” He told me that he could sell me organic Beauregards but didn’t have the other varieties that I needed. I told him that I might call him back. Based on that phone call he seemed good to work with but I wanted to find better prices and more varieties.

I had a list of farms to call but none of them grew organically. On one call I asked, “Do y’all have any organic sweet potatoes” and he said, “No, we just have Beauregards.” I thought I had solved my problem on the next call, only to learn later that they misunderstood that I wanted organic.

I called the last farmer on my list. He’s the only other organic sweet potato farmer in the area. I didn’t want to call him because he didn’t have a website and I thought that a farmer without a website would probably be difficult to work with in the context of an e-commerce business, especially since I wanted to find a farmer who could take care of the shipping and I’d handle everything else. But this farmer was the only other organic sweet potato farmer that I could find. He picked up his phone and I asked him what his prices were and told him how much I needed. He gave me an estimate and I said great, let’s make this order. He was saying something that I couldn’t understand and then hung up on me. I tried calling him back and texting him but I got no response. Obviously he doesn’t want to work with me but I found this very rude and not good business. His name is Hugh Petit. These farmers are operating on such a large scale that my current order volume is insignificant to their operation, like picking up change from the ground. But at least tell me that and not just ghost me. Also, this quote from a recent photo essay about somebody in Vardaman sweet potato community gives me more insight into how they might perceive outsiders: “Vardaman is such a small town, everybody that owns land, that farms, grew up here. I’ve never known anyone that’s moved in here, bought land, and started a farm. They were from here.” Which I feared might be the case going in.

So I had a huge unsolved problem. I couldn’t find the organic Murasaki sweet potatoes even though I had a bunch of Murasaki orders to fill. Customers were emailing about their order and wondering why it was taking so long. My backup plan was to find the potatoes in grocery stores. Surely organic sweet potatoes would be readily available at every single grocery store in Mississippi. I was scrambling to find some, driving around going to markets and looking for locally grown organic sweet potatoes. I’ve been living in the local food oasis of Vermont, and I knew that the local food system in Mississippi had a ways to go, but I didn’t think that it would be so hard to find locally grown organic sweet potatoes.

The organic farmers grow Beauregard, the same variety that everybody else grows. No organic farmers grow any of the specialty varieties, or if they do then they are already accounted for when they harvest. So I found a market gap, and I have some ideas to address this, but future plans couldn’t solve my immediate problem of customers who ordered the organic Murasaki sweet potatoes. I had a bunch of unhappy customers and no product to send them. I had conventionally grown Murasaki so I offered these customers a choice: 1) they could get a refund or 2) another organic variety for a discount or 3) conventionally grown Murasaki sweet potatoes at a discount or 4) wait until I’m back in Vermont and can find organic Murasaki sweet potatoes.

Everybody chose to wait until I have the organic Murasakis. Now I’m on the hunt for them within like a day’s drive of Vermont. I’ve spoken to two big sweet potato farmers in Vermont. Justin at Burnt Rock Farm said their crop was destroyed by the flood in July (which was an incredibly devastating flood and I should’ve known better than to ask him because now I remember hearing about his crop being destroyed). Tim at Laughing Child Farm said they had Beauregard and Covington but couldn’t supply other varieties. I see his product at City Market in Vermont, including the Murasaki sweet potatoes, so I’m guessing that all of his specialty varieties are already claimed by big accounts like City Market.

Another interesting thing I learned about sweet potatoes in Vermont: Laughing Child Farm basically brought this crop to the state. The conventional wisdom for new small organic farms in Vermont was to have a diverse set of crops which would help weather any crop failures etc (basically just the wisdom of diversifying in business). Tim at Laughing Child just couldn’t make sense of that for his business, and decided to go all in on sweet potatoes. This was successful and it appears to have changed the way they farm in Vermont. Now the state has a lot of the classic CSA farms that provide a diversity of crops, along with the specialty farms who grow a small selection of crops, like Laughing Child farm that specializes in sweet potatoes. (If you are interested in this history, read more about their farm.)

I set out to learn about Shopify and Google Ads, but actually food distribution is what I’ve really enjoyed learning about. I have a friend who is a buyer for a food hub and I’m always interested to hear about his work. I told him about this idea in the past but it doesn’t really pass the “local food system” smell test. I’m biased since it’s making me money so I can’t give a fair opinion on whether this is terrible or not. Shipping food long distances goes against the idea of a local food system, but if I source these potatoes from a local farm then I’m giving money to a local farm. Which helps them stay in business and continue providing food to the community. I don’t want to do business with those big farmers who are working a thousand acres with migrant labor who barely make minimum wage doing back breaking work to harvest the sweet potatoes and will ignore me because I’m not a local to Vardaman and have a small order. Naw I’m good. I will source my product from small farms who pay their workers well and are kind people. I also have plans to grow my own.

I’m curious to know about how significant the “food miles” of this business would contribute to climate change. The carbon footprint of transporting food over long distances is one reason why local food advocates encourage local food production (which to be clear, I buy the bulk of my food each week from local sources so I am local food-pilled). I briefly imagined a world where a lot of people copied the Vidalia Onion Guy for every single crop and we suddenly have all of our food being drop shipped by individuals. If we ever get to that point then our food system is in a very bad place and it’s not the fault of individuals who are responding to that opportunity (though an argument could be made that those individuals should start farms instead…which this venture has led me to do, but not everybody is cut out to be a farmer as Wendell Berry recognized in one of his essays in The Unsettling of America.). If you care about local food then tell your local farms to start growing more sweet potatoes so I don’t have to ship them to people who can’t find good quality. So idk. I guess I’m only now 80-90% local food-pilled. Also coffee. And fruit. And olives. It’s citrus season by the way and I was told about this farmer who does regenerative agriculture methods for growing citrus and I recommend you order some before they’re sold out.

Part of me wants to roll up to Vermont after Christmas with a trailer full of southern food fares: sweet potatoes, pecans, grits, crystal hot sauce, Leidenheimer poboy bread, satsuma oranges, frozen buttermilk biscuits, etc. Just become the guy in Vermont who imports southern food products. I’ve noticed the immigrants in Vermont move there and open restaurants or some type of food business. They bring their foodways and make it a part of the community, creating a new foodways in Vermont. (I’ve also dreamed about opening a catfish food truck to sell fried catfish and poboys at the farmers market…but I have too many projects right now.)

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. Use this code: Ipomoea batatas for a 15% discount on www.sweetclay.net. I’ll have all the varieties in January!