Despite reputation, farmers consider bamboo as cash crop

Bamboo has a reputation: an ever-metastasizing nuisance; a third-world weed; “the poor man’s timber.” But it wasn’t always like this. River cane — one of three bamboo varieties native to the American southeast — once flourished along Carolina riverbeds and across vast, dense acreages known as canebrakes.

“As a part of the colonization of America, European settlers fed their cattle on the giant timber bamboo because it was the most nutritious thing, outcompeting and driving the buffalo away, which was itself part of the effort to eradicate native people, the Cherokee in this region in particular,” farmer Everest Holmes says. Currently a mushroom farmer outside Asheville, he finds himself among a younger generation of farmers seeking to rethink the hows and whys of small-scale agriculture.

“To me, [bamboo] is the epitome of regenerative farming because it lives for so long and is good for the environment, producing three times more oxygen than any other plant,” Holmes says. “You’re getting a timber product, a food source and a potential agro-tourist attraction.”

On May 24, he found himself walking NC A&T State University’s farmland as the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at A&T co-hosted a free workshop on cultivating bamboo as a cash crop, along with OnlyMoSo USA Corps, a sales and consulting company focused on the creation and maintenance of bamboo plantations. OnlyMoso pitched to around two dozen convening farmers from across the Carolinas and Virginia. Importing bamboo seeds and plants from abroad is illegal in the United States, but private companies filled the resource gap in the decades since the US Department Agriculture’s bamboo program went dark in the early ’70s as the country focused on corn, wheat and soy, and made big shifts in production, moving towards the factory-farm model. David Benfield, a bamboo consultant and co-founder of Brightside Bamboo, the largest bamboo nursery in the Carolinas, attended. He says there are several species highly suitable for commercial farming in North Carolina.

Read more: https://triad-city-beat.com/despite-reputation-farmers-consider-bamboo-cash-crop/