Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 19, 1992 TAG: 9201170167
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
A BIG BROCCOLI BOOSTER
Charlie O'Dell doesn't need a pulpit to preach about broccoli. He just needs someone to listen.For a time in the early 1980s, his flock was a group of tobacco farmers - domestic consumption of tobacco was down and Virginia seemed to be losing its cash crop.
"They were scared to death," O'Dell recalled recently from his small room in Virginia Tech's extension offices.
Tech officials checked the books. They began a priority research program. They rediscovered broccoli.
Broccoli, O'Dell told the farmers, could bring in money. And besides, he said more than once: "It's the No. 1 crop in nutrition. That's all a vegetable man needs for justification."
Not long after that, tobacco made a comeback. So the vegetable man had to give up on the tobacco farmers and look for a new flock.
Years later, with only 24 farmers in the state still growing the green flowerettes, he's still looking.
But two of his farmers had a record-breaking season, so his hopes are up.
He pulled a plaque from an office shelf and dusted it off a bit. "Virginia Broccoli Week," it said. 1984.
"Governor [Charles] Robb had authorized a special week for broccoli then," he said. "Now you couldn't feature it."
O'Dell's job is not to promote things. "You're supposed to educate people, give farmers the option. But with broccoli being No. 1 in nutrition - well, it's difficult to tell if you're promotin' or just being enthusiastic about growin'."
So maybe he was just being enthusiastic when he taped a photo of the Jolly Green Giant to his office door.
Maybe he was just being enthusiastic when his wife, also a horticulturalist, made a broccoli corsage for a graduate student for his sister's wedding. "They were afraid he'd really wear it down the aisle." It made it down the aisle - but just in the rehearsal.
Or maybe he's being so enthusiastic because, to him, broccoli is still a new discovery.
You see, O'Dell didn't find broccoli until late in life. "I didn't really know it as a child," he said. He knows it now. And he worries about it.
He worries, for instance, what George Bush's distaste for the vegetable is doing for its public relations.
He smiles broadly. "I mean, really. Before I'd vote for him again, he'd need to eat broccoli in public."
Jeff Hill doesn't like broccoli, either - at least, not cooked. But that didn't stop him from growing it last year.
He pulled in a bumper crop, his first try.
"Charlie was trying to get people started on the mountain," said Hill, who lives in Carroll County. "He thought it was an ideal climate, with ideal conditions. He's been trying to get people here to grow it for the last few years."
Broccoli needs consistent rainfall or irrigation. Last year, in Carroll, they had the rain.
Hill turned 400 boxes of broccoli out of three-fourths of an acre. A typical crop is 300 boxes per acre.
Hill is sold. He plans to grow broccoli again next year.
Ned Henderson's been at it longer - nine years - and it hadn't paid off. This year might have been his last.
"If I don't get any money out of it, you know, I have to give it up. That's the name of the game."
But he pulled in 1,517 boxes from three acres.
This year, the Southside Virginia Produce Co-op in Halifax paid farmers a flat rate of $5 per box. And when the season ended, farmers were to get an additional payment, based on the overall season average. The total could be $8 or $9 a box, O'Dell said.
At that price, a farmer who produced 500 boxes would clear $1,800 or more, O'Dell predicts.
The crop requires about 100 hours of labor, depending on the size of the field. Irrigation costs, and so does a four-row precision seeder, he says, if farmers choose to go that route.
This week, Henderson was waiting for that additional payment to come in before he figured out how profitable his venture was.
And O'Dell, who has bragged about Henderson and Hill more than once, said: "Their pictures are going on my wall. Soon as I get them framed."
He says their crops are proof that broccoli can turn a profit in Virginia.
O'Dell is dreaming of the time when broccoli will no longer be ignored. The produce industry and the National Cancer Institute, he said, are encouraging people to eat five vegetables a day.
The day he heard that, he went to the DMV and got a new license plate: "5ADAY4U." No one else seems to know what it means.
But to O'Dell, it means vegetables can put years on your life. It means vegetables can reduce cancer risk.
It is vindication for the mothers of the world, who have been saying "eat your vegetables" for years.
And it means that, if people take it seriously, fruit and vegetable consumption could double by the year 2000. "And think of what that would do for the market in Virginia."
Think.
The East Coast states have different growing seasons for broccoli, O'Dell says, and wouldn't compete with each other.
Americans everywhere could be eating "good Virginia broccoli," he said.
But first things first.
First, O'Dell must find a group of farmers who will grow the stuff - people who will tend it, irrigate it, mother it.
They're out there somewhere.
Maybe, he says, a gleam in his eye, "the wheat farmers."