About The Southern Heritage Crops Project

The vast majority of South Carolina’s farms are small farms, though larger farms often garner a disproportionate amount of attention. Identifying strategies to enhance the livelihood of small and medium farmers can have a substantial impact on South Carolina’s agricultural industry while advancing rural development outcomes. Southern Heritage Crops possibly represent such a unique opportunity for many small/medium sized farmers in the South. The current market for SHCs has not been systematically measured, despite the conspicuous success of several regional grower producers repeatedly in the news. Even if the market is robust, many farmers likely lack the know-how to efficiently and effectively grow these crops profitably. The Southern Heritage Crops Project aims to help ameliorate these issues.

The long-term goals of this project are two-fold. One, to enhance profitability of small- and medium-sized farms through production and marketing of SHCs. Two, to increase planning for, and investment in the infrastructure that small and medium-sized farms require for success in the niche SHC market. This project builds upon existing efforts in South Carolina and surrounding states involving several successful examples of SHC production and marketing development. The development of a set of source-identified niche products under the “Southern Heritage Crops” moniker potentially lends itself to a regional branding strategy that could help provide the sophisticated marketing approaches necessary for SHCs to truly find their value in the marketplace.

In addition to the culinary appeal of SHCs to consumers and the associated profit potential for savvy small/medium farmers, this project presents a means for using market-driven approaches to sustain important dimensions of the plant genome. SHCs, by virtue of their being improved upon through careful selection over many generations of farmers, carry genetic traits resulting in superior flavor, nutrition, and wholesomeness. Preservation of the genome represented in SHCs might be of great benefit to future generations in their efforts to adapt to changes in environmental growing conditions while human populations continue to increase.

The secondary goal of this project is to increase the amount of support for the associated “hard” and “soft” infrastructure and to integrate these strategies into regional development efforts. Hard infrastructure refers to tangible, built infrastructure like storage or processing facilities. Soft infrastructure refers to having organizations, a regulatory environment, and other necessary institutional components in place and trained people to effectively operate them for the benefit of small farmers. The SHC project will help to facilitate the infrastructure development process by making research-based recommendations for public and private strategic investments necessary to develop the SHC sector to its full potential. These investments are likely to positively influence non-SHC sector development for the benefit of small-medium scale farmers.