Hunting for a New Cash Crop

The bitter-tasting vegetable is actually spelled gboma by West Africans. Afantchao is just pleased that the Edelens, whose ancestors farmed tobacco for generations, tried a new and exotic crop.

Afantchao is on a crusade to increase the number of local farmers growing ethnic vegetables. He and Stephan Tubene, a Congolese immigrant who runs the Small Farm Institute at the University of Maryland and its fields in Upper Marlboro, started working together in the 1990s when they realized that immigrants craved the fresh produce they ate in their homelands.

"My kids can eat the fast food Monday through Sunday, but I can't," said Tubene, 43, of Glen Burnie. "I need to eat my fufu or my egusi ."

He's not the only one with a hankering for fufu (a type of African porridge) or egusi (ground melon seeds used as seasoning). Ethnic foods are part of the $25 billion specialty food industry, whose sales jumped 16 percent between 2002 and 2004, according to the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade.

So the two Africans began researching which tropical vegetables could best be grown in the soil around Washington. In December, Tubene published the 20-page first edition of the "Ethnic and Specialty Vegetables Handbook." They constantly tell growers about this burgeoning market.

On a recent sun-baked afternoon at an Upper Marlboro research farm, a few dozen curious farmers showed up at the quarter-acre plot to gaze at the unusual produce. Tubene held up what looked like a watermelon shrunken to the size of a golf ball.

"Anybody recognize this?" he said.

The farmers looked puzzled. " Tomatinas ?" someone finally guessed.

"They are eggplants!" Tubene declared. "The Thai variety."

Some farmers are skeptical of growing plants they've never heard of. But Christine Bergmark, director of the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission, said she anticipates more growers will turn to ethnic vegetables if they can do it profitably.

"You've got to remember that Southern Maryland was founded on a crop that no one knew much about: tobacco," she said. "That was a new, novel crop back then. But it worked pretty well for almost 400 years."

Although there are no precise statistics measuring the number of farmers growing ethnic vegetables, experts say the number is steadily increasing. Immigrants also are starting to grow their own vegetables. The New York-based National Immigrant Farming Initiative estimates that 60 percent of farm workers in the United States are foreign-born.

Haroun Hallack, 39, who was born in Sierra Leone, grows ethnic vegetables on his farm in West Virginia. He sells to customers throughout the Washington region who want their African produce fresh, not canned or imported.

"We cannot satisfy the demand," he said.

As he toils in his St. Mary's field, Hertzler doesn't give much thought to the culinary preferences of West Africans. He grew n'goyo for a year before he tried it, and he doesn't plan on cooking it again.

"They don't actually taste good," he said. "I gave it to people, and they said it was terrible."

But as he took a bite of a tennis ball-size n'goyo on a recent morning, Hertzler noticed something strangely appealing about the vegetable, picked fresh in the field. It may not be sweet like an apple, he said, but there's something about it that makes you want to keep chewing.

"I'm not sure that I like it," Hertzler said, taking another bite. "But I'm going to keep eating it."