VIDEO: Annual Sweet Potato Festival

VARDAMAN, Miss. (WCBI)- Organizers boast it’s the largest one-day festival in the State of Mississippi.

If you were part of the crowd at today’s Vardaman Sweet Potato Festival, it would be hard not to agree.

There was a sea of humanity in downtown Vardaman. There were plenty of the usual street vendors you see at festivals.

But many people came to get stocked up on what this town is known for, the sweet potato.

Tommy Scarbrough is the acting President of the Vardaman Sweet Potato Festival. He says Sweet Potatoes are the life blood of this town.

“It provides a lot of jobs for a lot of people, especially in the packing industry and also seasonal workers, there are a lot of seasonal workers. But it’s a year round job for a lot of people. My grandfather was actually a sweet potato farmer. I came down here from Memphis and retired because this is where I wanted to live,” said Scarbrough.

Scarbrough’s mother remembers growing up on a sweet potato farm.

“I remember my mother and my dad clearing property just to plant sweet potatoes. I pulled them up by hand. My dad stuck them in the ground with a stick,” says Scarbrough.

Bobby Witt has been a sweet potato farmer for sixty years.

“I remember in Vardaman we used to have like 15-hundred acres of sweet potatoes now we have over 28-thousand acres of sweet potatoes. So this industry has really grown. It’s always been kind of a family oriented thing. I goes back to like my dad we as children and grandchildren many different family farms around here and it’s just kind of grown,” says Witt.

Sweet potatoes are such an essential part of the Vardaman economy that it is very important to raise up the next generation of sweet potato farmers. That is why the Vardaman High School chapter of the Future Farmers of America is so important.

“What we try to instill in these kids is a sense of responsibility and hard work and we have some really great kids here. We have about 80 kids in our FFA chapter which is pretty good for a small school. So we try to make sure that we’re getting them ready for when they become adults and they know to give back to their community when they’re older,” says FFA adviser Amanda Taylor.

FFA member Tyler Hawkins says he would recommend FFA to any student.

“It’s a good learning experience even if you’re not interested in farming. You can learn how to public speak in front of people and just do things that you wouldn’t normally do. In my future I would to actually teach agriculture and let everybody else know how to do it and stuff,” says Hawkins.

Many of the sweet potato farmers in Vardaman participated in an F-F-A program when they were in school.