The poetry of sweet potatoes

This week, I got to tour a sweet potato farm. Not a commercial one; one that is on 10 acres of land, with sweet potatoes grown on 1 acre of it, one where a person comes along and picks up the produce after it's been dug by machinery; one at which a real hand touches each little potato.

I don't understand root crops. Before this, I'd never really thought about what a sweet potato is; I'd assumed it was for my benefit, the product of a plant offering itself up to me, rather than a root whose purpose is to store food and nutrients for the plant so it can continue to survive and reproduce, regardless of me.

But Hodge, the farmer giving me the tour, knew. He has dedicated years of his life in undergraduate and graduate school and farming thereafter to studying and thinking about sweet potatoes, and he knows the vegetable intimately, how it is built and functions. He is innovative in thinking of and studying new ways to cultivate the root to make harvesting it easier and help it bear the most fruit it can. And he cares for it. Deeply. It's evidenced in the way he speaks about the plant, the dedication of his life to studying what is possible within it, his attention to it. This small little root most people overlook, he lets it matter.

Of all the things to know about in the world, Hodge has chosen to know about sweet potatoes. It is a beautiful thing.

While he demonstrated how they are planted, he told me the sweet potato needs to undergo some amount of stress in order to grow bigger; because it's a storage root, when it's hot and hasn't been watered, it reacts to the stress with its instinct to store nutrients, putting on size. Because of this, many old-timer farmers often tell younger farmers to resist the urge to irrigate when it gets dry.

Although it might seem like they're being neglectful or absent, under the farmers' knowledge of the root and care for it, they are actually helping it grow bigger, allowing it, through a hands-off approach, to trust itself and do what it was made to do: store food and grow. They are not going to let it die, and when they know the time is right, they give it water so it can continue to thrive. It's about helping the plant bear the most fruit it's capable of growing.

The sweet potato is poetry. The farmer, a poet. We, a sweet potato, rooted in the ground. As he spoke, I thought of God and all the ways we wonder if God is around. In the drought, asking when the water is coming because it's water we rely on to show us the farmer is near. But what if we relied on love to know the farmer is here. What if we are his livelihood, and drought a part of his attention and care?

In September, they'll start digging the sweet potatoes. Carefully, because their skin is thin, and they bruise easily; any cut can usher in disease. They'll use machinery to gently loosen them from the dirt, and the roots we know as sweet potatoes will turn over, delivering themselves up in the sandy soil, ready.