Twelve years ago, Larry Oberdeck was working winters in a tobacco warehouse, a crop industry that was steadily declining. As a full, but small time farmer, Oberdeck was raising corn, soybeans and tobacco. His tobacco acreage had been reduced from 14 to two acres and he needed to find extra ground to work. “Another fella and I started to decide what we could raise because the tobacco industry was going nowhere,” Oberdeck says. “We were sitting around talking one day about what people would want to buy and how we could use our land.” They hit upon asparagus. Oberdeck knew nothing about asparagus and decided to do some research to find out if this was something he could possibly do.
“We didn’t have the Internet back then,” he says. “It was around, but we didn’t have it. My sister-in-law worked at a library, and she got me all this information on how to raise asparagus.” After looking through all the information, Oberdeck says he found each asparagus plant would produce 50 pounds of asparagus a year under the right conditions. “You add up how many plants per acre and it dawned on me that if I could sell all I had it would be better than tobacco an acre,” Oberdeck says. The next step was to plant. He says he wasn’t sure what he was going to get since it takes two to three years to establish asparagus, but he was excited for what was to come. He planted his first quarter acre in 1997.
The first thing he wanted to find out was if he could raise it and if he could actually get a crop from it. He found out asparagus needed to be planted a foot deep in the ground, but then only covered with 2 to 3 inches of soil. Oberdeck wasn’t sure how he was going to do all that digging and covering in an efficient way. “I ended up going to Farm and Fleet and found a sod buster,” he says. “I was able to make a trench by hooking it up to the tractor. I got to thinking, ‘How in the world am I going to cover up all this asparagus.’ It dawned on me that I had a cultivator and if I went just fast enough it would throw the right amount of dirt into the furrow. The only thing I had to do by hand was throw the crowns in.”
He hoed the crop the first year so it would start out good, but figured he didn’t need to do much afterwards. “I learned an awful lot from the first quarter acre,” Oberdeck says. “I thought asparagus would grow anywhere, seeing it grows wild in ditches, but found out there is more to it than that. If you don’t keep the weeds off the field, and don’t take care of it like any other field, you aren’t going to get a crop.” The next year Oberdeck planted another acre and a half, and by the year 2000 he had three and a half acres. He was just starting to sell the first batch at $1.50 per pound. He began to realize picking all of the asparagus was going to be kind of a problem because the first flush seemed to come all at once. “In the early days, I had a friend who had a vegetable stand and asked her if she would sell it for me,” Oberdeck says.
“I would take up about 30 pounds per day. It was really encouraging for me because people started calling me for orders, and I had so much asparagus.” Currently, Oberdeck says he is picking the asparagus by hand because it’s been faster for him, but he also has a contraption that his brother made. “Years ago my brother made me something I could ride on,” he says. “It’s an old Snapper mower he extended by putting a platform on it. It’s really nice because one man can drive or two people can sit on it and put the asparagus in the middle. But this year, it’s just been faster for me to pick it by hand.” Oberdeck says one of his main goals all along was to have enough asparagus to sell every day. He wanted to make sure if people were calling he wouldn’t have to say he didn’t have any available since people just quit asking for it. He harvests his fields daily. It wasn’t until about four years ago that Oberdeck started his own asparagus stand. He likes to keep his asparagus priced so people can afford it. “I learned you have to sell the best,” Oberdeck says. “You have to put out the best. If there are any flaws or it’s not the best you might as well not even try to sell it. You want people to know you have great quality.
So that’s what I strive for.” He says he can sell 40 bunches easily on his stand during the weekend. Oberdeck is now raising about four acres of asparagus and harvesting close to 1,500 to 2,000 pounds per year. “This year it started so early,” he says. “It started growing at the end of March so I don’t know how long it will grow this year. The season usually lasts six to eight weeks.” Oberdeck says he always quits picking by Flag Day to let the asparagus go dormant and keep its nutrients for the following year to make more crowns. During his asparagus experience, Oberdeck says he hasn’t had any frustrations. “It was really exciting from the start,” he says.
“It was something new to see if I could do it, to see if it would grow and to see if I could sell it. It’s so much different than any other crop and nobody else really does it.” At the time Oberdeck began his field he thought it should last close to 20 years and by the time he was ready to retire it would be his full time hobby. “I’m not a big farmer, I don’t have a lot of land, but I like to try new things,” he says. “Who knows, maybe in a year or two I’ll check into raising rhubarb. It’s like asparagus, people who like it, like it and those who don’t, don’t.”
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