Ginger Takes Root in Carolina Soil

In 2016, Guochen Yang, Ph.D. decided to spice up North Carolina farming by testing ginger as a new niche crop for small-scale growers. Yang knew from his childhood in rural China that ginger was both tasty and medicinally beneficial, and as a horticulture professor in the United States, he has watched its popularity grow as both a spice for cooking and a desirable natural remedy for colds, aches and pains.

He also knew that the state’s small farmers needed a crop to help replace some of the income once generated by tobacco. Although ginger would not be the production crop that tobacco had been because of the state’s climate, Yang reasoned that the spice had the earning potential – and the public interest – to give farmers’ bottom lines a boost, if a growth protocol could be found.

Seven years and several grants later from U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Evans-Allen program, Yang is smelling the spicy smell of success. He, and his research team, have figured out how to grow this tropical crop outside the tropics and have introduced many small farmers across the state to ginger cultivation, opening their eyes to the possibilities of growing this potentially lucrative, niche crop.

“Young ginger can bring more than fifteen dollars a pound, conservatively, and each plant easily has the potential to generate one to two pounds of ginger root,” Yang said. “Using tissue-culture propagation, we can produce thousands of plants at once. After they have factored out expenses, farmers can make a lot of money.”

Since most of North Carolina’s growers are defined as ‘small,’ meaning they make less than $50,000 of profit each year, a successful niche crop to grow in addition to their main crops can make a big difference for many, Yang said.

So far, the team’s studies have yielded valuable information about the types of ginger that grow best in North Carolina – Hawaii Yellow, Kali Ma, Chinese White and Khing Yai among them – along with the growing conditions they need and what to avoid. He has learned that it is possible to plant ginger in an open field here, thanks to North Carolina’s nine-month growing season; that ginger can grow in high tunnels, hoop structures and even woodland areas; and that two-gallon buckets are not big enough for holding transplanted seedlings in a greenhouse.

Horticulture professor Guochen Yang, left, is joined by Ph.D. students William Lashley, center, and Julia Robinson, as they check on one of their ginger research plots.

Now that many of the traditional production issues have been solved, Yang and his team are turning to a new phase of the project: studying the ginger plants’ physiology, the chemistry and physics behind their functions.

Ginger is packed with phytonutrients, the natural compounds in plants that can benefit health. Ginger’s phytonutrients are gingerols and shogaols, two compounds that have shown promise in fighting cancer, reducing inflammation, aiding digestion and buffering aspirin. As an increasingly health-conscious public has become aware of these attributes, ginger’s popularity has risen.

By studying ginger physiology, Yang and his team can learn how to reliably produce high-quality, disease-free plants that retain their healthful properties, even as their growth is multiplied. For this, Yang turns to his specialty, tissue-culture propagation, in which plants are grown from a single piece of tissue in a nutrient medium, and then micropropagated, producing thousands of identical seedlings in the laboratory.

“Tissue-culture propagation allows us to produce thousands of plants from one bud, solving the sourcing issue,” he said. “But then, we start to wonder: Are the levels of phytonutrients the same as in root-grown ginger? Do they stay at a high level if we use a plant to grow the next ‘generation’? Do subsequent generations remain disease-free, or do they become more susceptible when transplanted into the field or greenhouse?”

Yang, Lashley and Robinson check their micropropagated ginger seedlings in the lab.

So far, Yang and his team have grown five generations of tissue-cultured ginger, and results are promising: in tests, the fifth-generation ginger appears to be as high in healthy phytonutrients as the first generation, and as disease-resistant.

Yang’s group are spreading the word through workshops and trainings for farmers across the state. His long-time collaborators, Ray Tuegel and Cheryl Ferguson of Plum Granny Farms in King, have successfully grown two kinds of “baby’’ ginger, or ginger that is harvested while still very young, using Yang’s method and have hosted training sessions at their farm as well.

But their results have led to more questions.

“Everything we do points to another question that we want to answer,” said Julia Robinson, a Ph.D. student working in Yang’s lab. “We want to do a shade study to see how it will affect the way the rhizome grows, or whether being grown in shade will affect the contents of gingerols and shogaols in the plants. Just recently, we started growing in the wooded area, and we need to fully evaluate any changes we see in the plants as a result.”

Another Ph.D. student working with Yang, William Lashley, agreed.

“We can go deeper and deeper, but it feels good to have accomplished so much,” he said. “We want to do something meaningful for farmers.”