This article originally appeared in the Delmarva Daily Times and features Greenbelt Farmers Market farmer, at Hockmuth.

Farmer still grows taters despite labor

By Brice Stump
Staff Writer

MARDELA SPRINGS -- Yes, said farmer Pat Hochmuth, he will plant sweet potatoes again this year.

So a tradition begun more than 70 years ago remains for another season.

His father and grandfather were once among many Wicomico County farmers seeding acres and acres of warm earth with slips, the tender sprouts of bedded sweet potatoes that bear the harvest of late summer. In those days, Hochmuth said, almost every farmer had a few acres on potatoes, and some had 200 acres or more in sweet potatoes.

Then came a change. It seemed like it happened overnight.

King Sweet was no more.

Now only a half dozen or so farmers in the county grow sweet potatoes on a fraction of the acres of years back.

Area farmer Kenny Bennett said in those early days his family had up to 60 acres in potatoes, too, but no more.

"We got out of the potato business in the mid-1980s," Bennett said.

He's still farming, but grows other crops.

"At least for 50 years every farmer had sweet potatoes. It's a year around job growing 'em, their labor intensive, like operating a dairy farm," he said.

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