A Scottsbluff Businessman who persuaded a group of farmers to grow the root crop is planning to open a new roasting plant this fall in western Nebraska.

     Romans ate their roots in salads.  Colonial Americans roasted, ground and boiled them as a substitute when coffee was scarce.  French farm animals still eat the leaves. 

       

     But for all its history, the chicory plant has never found commercial success on American farms.  Other crops were more profitable, easier to grow or just more readily available.

     So Epicureans pining for savory New Orleans' chicory coffee had to get the stuff imported from Europe.

     But not for much longer. 

       

     Four years ago, David Hergert, a Scottsbluff businessman, convinced three farmers in western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming that chicory would be a profitable crop.  He expects to have about 10 farmers growing more than 1,000 acres under contract this year.

     In 2001, his chicory processing plant began operation, slicing and drying the turnip-like roots for use in pet food.

     "When it opens, it will be the only one like it in this country," said Hergert, standing in the shadow of hundreds of tons of dried chicory flakes piled in a storage warehouse, ready to be shipped to pet food manufacturers.  "We plan to completely replace what's being imported from Europe, and then begin exporting ourselves."

    

     The new, $2 million plant will employ 20 people in addition to the 50 who work at Hergert's current plant during the processing season.

     Native to Europe, the chicory root looks like a longer, thinner sugar beet, a crop already grown profitably in this part of the state.  The dried flakes of the roots taste a bit like bitter potato chips, without the salt and oil.

       

     Hergert has been working with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Food Processing Center to find new uses for the plant.  Chips are one possibility, as is flour for use in brownies, cookies and chocolate cake.

       

     With prices for such commodity crops as corn and soybeans failing to keep up the inflation or falling as they become cheaper to produce, boutique crops, including chicory are making their way into Nebraska, helping farmers and shaking up the American diet.

     Agriculture groups encourage alternative crop production as a way to stabilize crop prices and give smaller farms a profitable niche.  Thomas Jefferson said that the greatest thing a person could do for his country was introduce a successful new plant.

    

     Across town from Hergert's processing plant, David Baltensperger's office wall is cluttered with food products that are pushing the grocery store envelope; amaranth cereal, dried chick peas, various types of pear millet, even a special type of wheat used to make ramen noodles.

       

     Baltensperger is an extension plant breeder at the University of Nebraska Panhandle Research and Extension Center, and the man responsible for bringing some of these crops, as well as chicory, to western Nebraska.

       

     Each new crop that the center considers introducing to the region requires years of biological research, market research, and eventually planting on the center's test fields in Scottsbluff.  UNL doesn't have money to subsidize farmers interested in making the switch from conventional to alternative crops, but it provides valuable training and advice.

       

     Some of the results: fledgling chick pea and grass seed farms near Alliance: brown mustard grown for bio-diesel fuel near Sidney; and plans to introduce amaranth, an ancient Inca grain similar to wheat, across western Nebraska.

       

     "There's a certain sense of entitlement that you should be able to make a living growing what you've always grown." Baltensperger says.  "But flexibility is a requirement of successful farming."

       

     For Nebraska's Panhandle, "alternative" crops are defined as anything other than wheat on dry land, and anything other that sugar beets, corn, edible beans or alfalfa on irrigated land.

       

     Under this definition, about 25 percent of the region's nearly 3 million acres are planted with alternative crops.  But truly new crops - those introduced to the region in the past two decades, such as chicory, chick peas and sunflower seeds - account for less than 100,000 acres in the region, Baltensperger said.

       

     But there's a reason most Nebraska farmers choose to stick with corn, soybeans, sorghum and other staples.

       

     Growing new crops means learning new techniques, and it often requires expensive new equipment.  Herbicides that will kill unwanted plants, but not the new crops, are often unavailable or nonexistent.  Even herbicides used in other countries might have difficulty gaining U.S. regulatory approval.

       

     The U.S. Department of Agriculture stacks the deck in other ways as well.  Federal crop insurance isn't available for crops without a planting history.  Farm subsidies for existing crops can be put in jeopardy if a farmer plants unauthorized crops on some of his acres.

       

     This month, U.S., Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., submitted a bill to allow chicory growers to continue receiving existing federal payments for other crops.

       

     Alternative crops also have had some spectacular failures.  In the 1990s, a meal and oil crop called crambe was hailed as the most promising alternative crop in the Midwest.

       

     North Dakota farmers especially took to it and planted tens of thousands of acres.  Crambe grew well in North Dakota, but similar crops grew well in China, too, at a fraction of the cost, said Baltensperger.  There is now little crambe production in the United States. 

       

     But alternative crop champions point out that soybeans and sugar beets, mainstay of Nebraska agriculture, once considered alternative crops. 

       

     Ron Schlagel, a Torrington, Wyo., farmer who grows corn just west of the Nebraska border, expanded into chicory two years ago.

       

     For the past two years, he said, he grossed about $1000 an acre from chicory, compared to the $400 or so he earned from corn.

       

     Schlagel has faced the same obstacles as other alternative crop farmers, but the returns make it worthwhile, he said.

       

     Last year, he went to France to study that country's chicory industry.  This year he designed some of his own chicory-specific machinery to plant and harvest a crop that looks, but doesn't behave, like a sugar beet.

       

     "Before I went to France, my attitude was, 'It'll never be more than a niche crop.'  Now I think it just needs to be marketed and it could be big."