New use for N.C. sweet potatoes: Dried products for pet food, animal feed
Date posted: July 11, 2011
Dee Shore photoMaggie Hardee, of Barnes Farming Corp., looks on as Dr. Mike Boyette examines a slice of sweet potato during a on-farm demonstration of the Sweet Potato Dehydration Project. North Carolina is the leading state when it comes to producing both sweet potatoes and tobacco, and a new N.C. State University research project is designed to build on both strengths to create new markets for farmers. The Sweet Potato Dehydration Project is exploring ways to use tobacco-curing barns to dry sweet potatoes for use in pet food and animal feed.
The project is the brainchild of Dr. Mike Boyette, an N.C. State professor of agricultural engineering, and John Kimber, project director of the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission Foundation.
They believe that having a more economical way of drying sweet potatoes than the drum-drying technique now used in the United States could allow the state’s producers to compete with Chinese imports that are used in pet food and animal feed produced in the United States.
With a grant from the Rural Advancement Foundation International, or RAFI, they are figuring out if drying sweet potato slices with existing tobacco curing technology is feasible, if it fits a market need and whether it offers a chance for sweet potato and tobacco growers to make a profit.
Most of North Carolina’s sweet potato growers also grow tobacco, so they have tobacco curing barns that sit idle most of the year, when tobacco harvesting season isn’t taking place. Because North Carolina has storage facilities that can hold sweet potatoes all year, farmers could be drying sweet potatoes year-round in the heated barns, Boyette says.
The dried product — sliced, diced, cut French-fry style or ground into flour — could be made from sweet potatoes for which there’s a limited market: those that are too large or too small to be sold to grocery stores.
In this audio slideshow. Boyette describes the project’s rationale and the process that he and others involved in the project have been developing for drying sweet potatoes and marketing them (See end of story for transcript):
Participating along with Boyette, of N.C. State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, are Dr. Korinn Saker of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Dr. Van-Den Truong, a U.S. Department of Agriculture research food technologist stationed at N.C. State.
Barnes Farming Corp., one of the nation’s largest sweet potato producers and packers as well as flue-cured tobacco producers, provided sweet potatoes and a curing barn used in the project, and the Wayne E. Bailey Produce Co. of Chadbourn, another large producer and packer of sweet potatoes loaned a mechanical slicer.
The grant came from RAFI’s Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund, which is supported by the N.C. Tobacco Trust Fund Commission and designed to help farmers develop new sources of agricultural income
-Dee Shore
Dr. Mike Boyette: “When they grow sweet potatoes, the farmers try as best they can to harvest the potatoes when the majority of the potatoes that are in the field are U.S. Number Ones, because they are the ones in the most demand, and they are the ones they get the most money for.
“Over the years, the real little ones and the real big ones went into either canners or some sort of processing, which was very small. Well, still it’s not very great, and there are more of these potatoes than there is a market for.
“This is an attempt to take these potatoes and, on the farm, to add value. It was kind of a neat idea: If you take … sweet potatoes that are not very valuable, and we slice them and we can dry them in tobacco barn, then we can add value to this product. The question is, Who would like to have this dried material?
“One good thing about sweet potatoes is they contain no gluten, and there are people who are gluten-intolerant and there are animals — particularly dogs — that are gluten-intolerant.
“So consequently, if you are a formulator of animal feed, and you are looking for some carbohydrates to add to your dog food that is gluten free, one alternative is to buy sweet potato flour that is coming in from China.
Participants at a June 2011 demonstration of the Sweet Potato Dehydration Project included (from left) Dr. Mike Boyette; Johnny C. Barnes of Barnes Farming Corp.; John Ricks of Wayne E. Bailey Produce; Kendall Hill of Tull Hill Farms; George Wooten of Wayne E. Bailey Produce; Jerome Vick of Vick Family Farms; John Kimber of the N.C. Sweet Potato Commission Foundation, marketing consultant Roger Townley; Dr. Den Truong of N.C. State University; and Julius Tillery of the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA. Barnes, Wooten and Vick are on the board of directors of the NCSPCF.
“The idea was, let’s chip and dry some domestic sweet potatoes. We can guarantee a better quality, we can guarantee a better sanitation and all that sort of thing — and hopefully we can do it at a profit.
“Tobacco barn curing technology and what is required to dry sweet potatoes is very similar. When you are talking about drying sweet potatoes, this is something that we can do essentially year-round with these barns. We have sweet potatoes available year-round here in North Carolina because of our good storage facilities. And so, therefore, we can be drying sweet potatoes year-round.
“Let’s say, for example, you’ve got a big sweet potato storage and packing facility like Barnes Farming Corp. or Wayne E. Bailey Produce, which are large growers of sweet potatoes and also packers of sweet potatoes. They are sorting out thousands of pounds of canner-type potatoes per day.
“So as we would envision this, this material would have been taken and gone completely through their packing line. It would have been washed and sorted out, so we are not talking about any rotten potatoes. We are not talking about any kind of decay or anything like that. So it’s perfectly good potatoes.
“What we would do is, we would take those potatoes and they’d go through a slicer. The slicer we are using is an Urschel slicer, and this is the same machine that you can use to make slices, or you can make French fries, or you can dice the potatoes. So depending on who we are selling to, we might slice them; we might French fry them; we might dice them.
“And so this goes into the barn. And the barns are basically set up so that you would be able to dry overnight what you sliced today. And so I would be slicing today, I’m drying tonight, and sometime tomorrow I would be able to take this material out of the barn, and either it would be bagged up and shipped or, if it was to be ground, we would run it through a grinder.
“Once you take this material and dry it it’s essentially down to 0 percent moisture content. It’s got a very long shelf-life.
“Well, the next step to the project is to take this material and to send it out. And we would send it out as samples to potential buyers of this material. What we are doing is looking for feedback: Is this the right shape? Is this the right size? What sort of things are you looking for in this material? Is it ground too fine? Is it ground too course? That sort of thing.
“The project partners are N.C. State, the North Carolina Sweet Potato Commission Foundation, headed up by John Kimber. Money is coming from RAFI. And then … you’ve got Barnes Farming, because we are using their potatoes and their facilities. AIso, I would give some credit to Wayne E. Bailey Produce because they are the ones who allowed us to use their chopper/dicer/slicer.”
From Issue: Fall 2011 Category: Features, Media Releases, Perspectives
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