Tim and I had dinner together. He is widely traveled in the East and I in Latin America. We discussed the fruits and vegetables we cannot get back home in North America.
Let us say you took some Japanese tuber and planted a few thousand acres in Kansas with it. Let us say the new product took off like a rocket.
**Would there be any way to profit from this? **After all, most anyone could fly in a few tons of the stuff from Japan and follow your example without paying you a penny.
You could sell the Japanese tuber.
Everyone else wouldn’t do it unless they saw that it was successful. In other words, not until after you had already made a fair bit of profit on it.
After that, worst case, it wouldn’t be any less profitable for you than any other sort of farming. But if you were good at business, you would have used your head start to build up brand loyalty, and so you’d still be the most successful grower of Japanese tubers (even if you had competitors).
“Accept no substitutes. Buy only Samurai™ brand daikon!”
That’s the history of the concord grape. Ephraim Bull developed it and then tried to make a profit selling it. But he found it was virtually impossible to make people pay for something they could just grow.
[Ahnold]It’s not a tuber.[/Ahnold]
Daikon’s a radish.
There’s a nice international market chain in our area that carries daikon. Also a surprisingly large array of sweet potatoes but probably not as wide as you see in Japan. But definitely the most popular Japanese and Korean varieties.
Make sure your tuber isn’t already available like this.
Also note shipping costs: International bulk shipping is cheap. You’re competing with people in Asia. Think about this.
Back during one of the many farm crises of the 1980s, someone came up with the brilliant idea of growing Jerusalem artichokes as a cash crop. It ended up as a giant pyramid scheme.
I’d also be wary of introducing a plant that isn’t already growing here.At the very least, there will be paperwork involved.
Which “Japanese tuber” are you talking about?
I looked up the term and apparently it can refer to any of four things: taro, yam, sweet potato, or potato.
Sweet potato and potato are already commonly grown in the USA. So is daikon. Taro and yam are tropical plants and can’t be grown, at least not remotely economically, in the USA outside Hawaii. (What’s sometimes known as “yams” in much of the USA is actually sweet potatoes. True yams are a different thing entirely.) So if you’re talking specifically about one of those, then the answer either is ‘this isn’t a new crop at all in the USA, it’s quite common; which means that when it was a new crop it was successful’ or ‘you can’t grow it in Kansas, so that’s not going to be successful’.
If you’re using that only as an example: farmers try growing new crops all the time. As has been mentioned, it’s a really good idea, and very likely legally required, to first make sure you’re not importing a plant that’ll become invasive in the new location. Once past that hurdle, the two questions are whether it’ll grow reasonably well where you’re trying to introduce it, and whether there’s a market for it – either a market that already exists but is currently importing the crop, or a market that can be built up if you can get enough people to try it.
– Concord grapes were indeed commonly grown for sale, and sometimes still are. Welch was a big buyer, for grape juice. Wineries used to also. They’re no longer as commonly used for wine, but it is possible to make a pretty decent wine out of them, though most of what’s made out of them is too sweet for my taste. Bull’s problem was that he was selling plants, Concords are very easy to propagate, and this was long before anybody thought they could patent living things. He didn’t set the price high enough initially to make much, and apparently couldn’t compete with the large commercial nurseries which bought a few vines from him to begin with and then ran off with the market for vines.
I don’t understand the question.
Why is an agricultural product different than any product?
Anybody can import something from any country,and if it sells well, make a profit .But obviously you will also attract competitors.
Agriculture is a business.Why would importing Japanese tubers be different than importing Japanese furniture or Japanese cell phones ?
I think what’s necessary is to hire some local chefs (starting, perhaps, in high-end restaurants) to develop recipes that use the new produce. Put recipe cards next to the display in the supermarkets. In short, you have to build demand.
Due to the big risk of accidentally importing some plant that could escape into the wild, and become a dangerous invasive species, there are lots of regulations & paperwork required for the importation & propagation of new plants (& animals) into the US.
Chinese cell phones, while arguably a dangerous & invasive species, can’t reproduce on their own.
This is common in many countries, and even within them. For example, California has some strict controls about bringing certain fruits & vegetables into the state.
What you’re talking about is a barrier to entry- i.e. what is stopping others from getting in on a piece of the same pie (i.e. growing the same tubers in their fields and selling them)? Barriers to entry are sort of relative; for me, the lack of farmland is a pretty humongous barrier to entry. But for an established farmer, it’s not.
The trick I’d think would be to engage in branding your tuber as a specific product- “Samurai Brand” as **DesertDog ** says, and maybe even do something like register your particular variety as a specific thing and trademark that name. Kind of how you have Jazz apples- not anyone can go sell Jazz apples- they’re a trademark. They can go sell the same variety (Scifresh) all they want, but they can’t call them Jazz apples. Or Vidalia onions. Or Kamut wheat.
So once you have that locked in, your job, beyond just growing tubers of adequate quality and quantity, is working to convince the public that your branded ones are better in whatever ways than the generic, non-branded ones. Or maybe license your trademark out to growers- that might be the most lucrative option, if you have established the brand well.
Agricultural products are alive; at least, at any stage at which you’re talking about growing them, and unless processed then right up to the point of sale. (Produce doesn’t die when it’s harvested, unless the harvesting process chops it into bits – small bits, at that. Individual corn kernels are alive. Meat and often fish, at least in the USA, are killed before sale; but again are alive if you’re talking about raising them.)
This makes them different for three reasons:
One, as Tim@T-Bonham.net said and Kent Clark referred to, the plant itself may be invasive if grown somewhere it doesn’t belong, and may be unwise to import. Try searching up kudzu in the southeastern USA. Or, for animals, rabbits in Australia.
Two, as Kent Clark referred to, the plant or animal may be carrying diseases and/or pests not previously imported to the particular area, and which may cause far more serious problems in a new area because their own natural predators aren’t in the new area.
Three, again if you’re talking about growing things as the OP was, not everything can be grown everywhere. Some things won’t survive at all, or won’t survive to harvestable stage, due often to different climates but sometimes to things like prevalence of salts in the soil. Others will survive, but not produce well, due for instance to needing pollinating insects of a kind not available in the new area. Others will survive and produce, but the result may be tasteless or actively bad tasting, due to climate or soil conditions or possibly to things we don’t understand well.
Bump, there can also be major barriers to entry to a new crop for established farmers. A farmer with the correct equipment for growing corn and soybeans on a thousand acres in Kansas has a whole lot of money tied up in that equipment. And that equipment’s no good for growing, say, daikon. You can’t harvest daikon with a combine. If you’re talking about growing it for yourself in a kitchen garden, or even in a corner of a field for the local farmers’ market, you can get away with a digging fork for harvest (better have a good one, though.) If you’re talking about converting enough of that thousand acres to daikon to make it worth selling it wholesale, you need a whole new batch of equipment, for planting as well as for harvest and possibly also for cultivation and weed control, which won’t come cheap. And you won’t be able to take it to your grain mill, which doesn’t have the right kind of storage, or pack it in your usual fashion, or sell it to your usual customers – there’s a whole lot of financial investment involved, as well as the learning curve which is involved with learning how to grow any new crop, even in an area in which it’s reasonably easy to grow it well. And you need different crop rotations. And here in the sort of area in which you’ve got a thousand acres in corn and soybeans in Kansas comes your neighbor with an aerial sprayer full of something that won’t kill the crops genetically engineered to resist that herbicide but most certainly will kill your new crop if there’s any drift . . .
As I said, farmers do try new crops, all the time. But there are most definitely barriers to entry. Much of the experimentation is done by small growers in mixed-crop areas selling on a small scale, and/or by government-run experimental stations.
I’m not sure about the US, but in the UK there’s a crop registry, and if it’s not on the list, you can’t sell it as food. As a novel food, you’d need to pay to get it on the list, which involves safety testing, and isn’t cheap, before you can start selling it. Even if it’s been eaten for centuries somewhere else.
Once you’ve done that, the best way to profit would be to create your own variety and register that as a protected variety. That means no-one can grow it commercially without your permission (and presumably their £) until those rights expire. So you could have exclusive rights, but you’d need to cough up a fair amount and put quite a bit of effort in first.
I have a no shit real [as in identified by a noted arborist] American Chestnuttree … people have suggested that I harvest the nuts and sell them to uber chichi restaurants that could tout their signature Mont Blanc dessert made from real American Chestnuts …
Well, there is also Amorphophallus konjac, which isn’t native to Japan but is used as a food item there. (They grow pretty well in the US.)
Thank you all.
I thought that was because of insects that might be on the fruits and vegetables. It’s actually because of the fruits and vegetables?
If what you have is a chestnut blight resistant tree and not just one that survived due to isolation, I wouldn’t sell those nuts to restaurants. I’d sell them to nurseries and experiment stations to use in breeding programs. The descendents might not all have the resistance, of course; but some of them might.
Looks like they’d be difficult to grow in most of the country on a commercial basis, though. Digging them up every year to bring them in for the winter works pretty well for home growers, less well on a large scale.
We have our own problems in the USA with patenting and restricting of varieties; but we don’t have that particular complication. – I was under the impression that your registry also causes problems for people wanting to save seed of unusual varieties and/or to breed their own varieties. Is that true?
Yeah, that’s a load of crap (not your load of crap, of course.) All the Amorphophallus species that I followed those instructions on rotted in the first year or two of growing them. The konjac that I have now grew from small fragments left in the ground after digging up the original croms–they have been left in the ground ever since, and have thrived.