Roots: Cuban-American farmers in the Redland

10 Jan 2008: Regional, seasonal, freshly harvested. As these qualities that my grandmothers took for granted have become the mantra of 21st century food culture, South Floridians who care about such things have come to realize what a precious and imperiled resource we have in the Redland.

I got to know the beloved farming region of southern Dade County two decades ago through Homero Capote, a gifted Cuban-American farmer who taught me more about tropical roots than any agriculture textbook.

Last week, as a cold snap coincidently turned the media spotlight on Florida crops, I returned to the Redland. It was a bittersweet journey that, through the fortunes of the extended Capote family, brought home to me the daunting challenges our farmers face.

It's an aspect of the Cuban-American story that has received faint notice. Though comprising a small percentage of the exile population, farmers from throughout the island settled in the Redland beginning in the 1960s, preserving ancestral agricultural techniques while adapting to their new circumstances with remarkable flexibility and ingenuity.

Born on a farm near the town of Alquízar in fertile Havana province, Homero Capote fled Cuba by boat in 1965. His wife found work in a Hialeah sewing factory and he in a Miami furniture store. As soon as he was able, he returned to farming, laboring at first for a fellow exile and then leasing land himself near Homestead. (Back then, fields were plentiful and rents were cheap -- $15 to $20 an acre compared with today's $400 to $700.)

When I met Homero in 1987, he was growing Caribbean pumpkin (calabaza), yuca, malanga and boniato on about 300 leased acres and had established a small packing facility, South Rainbow Farm. As we walked through his muddy fields, he explained that most of his malanga and boniato crops had sprung from corms and cuttings his elderly father, Esteban, had mailed to him from Cuba, pressed between sheets of cardboard.

I will never forget his sense of pride and accomplishment one afternoon in a field near Krome Avenue as he dug up a splendid boniato of about three pounds.

''Y pensar que aquí no había ni donde amarrar a una chiva,'' he said. ``And to think that when I came here, there was not even a tree to tie a she-goat.''

Nor will I forget seeing fields of malanga, the luscious leaves as large as elephant ears, stretching to the horizon; vast yuca fields that reminded me of those of Costa Rica, and magnificent groves of coveted mamey protected by barbed wire and watch dogs.

It was the outline of new homes with their ersatz Mediterranean sameness that filled the horizon last week as my companion, agronomist Carlos Balerdi, and I pulled up to a boniato field near Southwest 172nd Street.

It belonged to J&C Tropicals, a thriving produce company founded in the 1960s by Homero's brother, Nibaldo Capote, and now in the hands of Nibaldo's children. J&C grows some 800 acres of boniato, the white-fleshed sweet potato much prized in the Hispanic Caribbean and elsewhere in Latin America.

We arrived in time for the largely mechanized harvest. While some workers filled plastic crates with beautiful boniatos of all sizes, others were busy gathering cuttings to replant the fields.

''Boniato is the last tropical tuber crop that can be profitably grown in South Florida,'' said Balerdi, just retired from the Miami-Dade County Cooperative Extension Service.

The reason: The tuber is in greater demand than ever thanks to Latin and Asian immigrants, but it is subject to an import ban intended keep out a pernicious pest, the sweet potato weevil.

Nibaldo ''Jessie'' Capote, 33, J&C's vice president of operations, envisions a substantial growth in boniato acreage, but tells me the bulk of the company's $50 million in annual revenues come from the sale of Latin and Asian imports -- a sure sign of the direction in which the winds of change are blowing.

It was a different scene later that day at South Rainbow Farm, where we found Homero Capoto's daughter and son-in-law, Cira and Severino Grandal, irrigating their fields in preparation for the cold wave.

Homero Capote died in 1994, before his time. The Grandals have carried on, farming the family's 200 acres. Cira, a 51-year-old who has her dad's good looks, tells me they have more customers than boniato as encroaching development has kept them from expanding.

This winter, she said, they will harvest their last malanga crop, unable to compete with cheaper imports, and will put the land in boniato.

As I watched Cira and Severino walk hand in hand through their malanga field, I felt a deep sense of loss. In the face of development pressures and import competition, many Cuban Americans in the Redland have abandoned food crops like yuca, malanga and calabaza for more profitable endeavors like landscaping and ornamental horticulture that cater to development.

Still, there are pockets of hope. Rogelio Sardiñas, a guava grower, finds an eager market for his fruit. Diego Rodriguez, a mamey grower, told me demand is growing and prices are high for his specialty crop, and he is confident it will remain viable.

Horticultural experts like Balerdi have been invaluable in directing farmers toward more profitable crops such as early-season avocados, sapodillas (nísperos), longan and pitahaya.

And there is still boniato. As long as import restrictions remain in place, it will be the lonely, sturdy survivor, the one root that can tell the story of pioneering Cuban-American farmers like the Capotes.