Hunting for a New Cash Crop

As Immigrant Populations Grow, Small Farms Turn to Ethnic Foods

Israel Hertzler isn't the sort of man who usually bucks tradition. On the rare occasions when the Amish farmer leaves his home on dusty Woodpecker Way, he drives a horse and buggy. He is partial to straw hats with wide brims and homemade trousers held up by worn suspenders. And for lunch most days? Meat and potatoes, of course.

So Hertzler was more than a bit leery when a businessman from Mali asked him three years ago to plant n'goyo , a bitter type of African eggplant with green ridges, in a part of Southern Maryland better known for tobacco barns and oyster-shucking houses.

"I said to him, 'You must be funny,' " said Hertzler, 32, of St. Mary's County. "I don't know the first thing about growing African eggplants."

But he does now. Hertzler and his brother have transformed their patch of Amish country into a United Nations of horticulture. Down the road from the half-acre of n'goyo grows another type of eggplant, known as njilu in the Congo Republic. Nearby is a plot of habanero peppers, highly prized in Latin America.

The patches of international vegetables are the latest example of how immigrants moving into the Washington region are reshaping the economy. As growing enclaves of ethnic groups, from Salvadorans to Ethiopians, hunger for fresh produce from their homelands, increasing numbers of farmers like Hertzler are trying to meet their needs.

The eagerness of some farmers to cast away traditional crops and turn instead to vegetables with names difficult for English speakers to pronounce underscores a growing desperation in the agricultural community, in which longtime growers are struggling to stay afloat.

Faced with falling crop prices and rising operating costs, more and more area farmers are accepting multimillion-dollar offers from developers and getting out of agriculture. Across the region, fields of tobacco and soybeans are giving way to a new crop: sprawling subdivisions.

But on quiet Lomax Road in Charles County, Lana Edelen is determined to keep her farm going. Part of the key to her success? The mix of ethnic fruits and vegetables she sells to Jamaicans, Latinos, Asians and Africans. Down past the rusty tobacco barns and rows of sweet corn, Edelen drives from patch to patch in a gray station wagon caked with mud.

She points at a green leaf known as callalou to Jamaicans. Then the Asian variety of eggplant known as ichiban . But Edelen runs into some trouble when she tries to describe a spherical yellow vegetable speckled with white. She calls it a garden egg.

"I don't know how you say it in their language because I don't speak it," said the 54-year-old former tobacco farmer. "I just know Africans like to eat it."

When she has to write down the vegetable's name, she writes it phonetically: B-O-M-A. Yao Afantchao, a Togolese immigrant who buys her vegetables and distributes them to local specialty stores, tries to correct her.

"He says, 'That's not the way it's supposed to be spelled. It's supposed to start with an H. And I say, 'Well, that's the way I spell it,' " Edelen said, looking exasperated. "What's the point of having an H if it's silent?"