With their fields stricken by drought, agronomist Charles Stichler thinks Texas farmers ought to consider one of history’s most treasured desert crops: sesame.
It’s hardy, noninvasive, and - due to spreading prosperity in Asia, where its oil is prized - very much in demand, Stichler said during a break at a recent irrigation workshop in Hondo.
His list went on. Labor costs are nominal. Sesame needs very little fertilizer. It’s resistant to insects, worms, wild hogs and other typical Texas ravagers. It has a short growing season and thrives in hot soils. And it’s drought tolerant.
“I think it’s the ‘now’ crop for us,” he said. “With less water, less polluting of the environment with fertilizers and pesticides, I think it’s an outstanding crop for us today.”
Stichler planted his first sesame in 1988 when he was a Texas A&M Extension agronomist in far West Texas searching for an alternative crop.
He now talks the plant up whenever he can, and sometimes consults for Sesaco, an Austin-based company that holds 13 patents for the world’s only varieties that can be harvested by machine.
The shatter-resistant seed developed by Sesaco founder Ray Langham, a plant breeder, knocked out the biggest barrier to the crop’s U.S. viability - harvesting was a painstaking process.
It’s been a lifelong pursuit. By age 10, he had joined the quest started in the 1940s by his father, a Cornell University plant breeder intent on finding a seed capsule that wouldn’t shatter before harvest.
“My father had me making crosses out in the fields,” he remembered. “In 1984, my father and I found one that held, and we proved it. And we proved it again in ’85 and ’86. We’ve improved it ever since then.”
Sesaco, launched in 1978, is now the sole provider of sesame seeds to farmers in a swath of the Sun Belt stretching from the Carolinas to California. It’s catching on, as representatives convince farmers to buy seeds and dedicate acreage. Sesaco then buys back the harvested seed.
Langham said there’s currently about 100,000 acres under contract with several hundred farmers, with roughly half of the acreage in Texas. Oklahoma and Kansas account for most of the rest.
“Basically, they take the production risk, and we take the market risk,” he said.
About 80 percent of the seed grown in the United States is consumed domestically, with the remaining 20 percent exported, primarily to the Far East. U.S. producers use the seed less for cooking oil than for high-energy snacks.
Trader Joe’s, for example, carries a line that is produced entirely from Texas-grown seed. The seeds long have been the rage for prettifying everything from burger buns to plates of stir-fry.
Langham sees sesame as an ideal rotation crop, something that can grow in soil that needs a rest from bread-and-butter crops like corn, grain and cotton.
The crop is reliable and uses less water, but revenues are less.
Farmers, particularly old timers, can be tough sells, said Brannon Lyssy, a Hidalgo County Sesaco representative who was trying to woo farmers at the workshop in Hondo. His table full of brochures and contracts didn’t get many takers.
“It’s like, ‘My daddy and his daddy grew cotton, so I’m going to grow cotton,’” he said.
But hard times can bring on change, said Steven Chapman, a High Plains sesame grower who’s now president of the American Sesame Growers Association.
“In 2003, I lost my [cotton] crop to a hail storm,” he said. “We had sub-surface irrigation, and I was scared to plant milo or maize on that ground because it gets a lot of rodents in it. I knew that sesame was bringing about the same kind of revenue. It was a new crop, but rats and mice don’t like to eat it. So I decided to try it.
“After that year, we saw that there was advantages to it … . It’s just been a good fit in certain circumstances for us up here.”
Business, Pages 64 on 04/21/2013