High-value specialty crops are not small potatoes in southwestern Michigan. Cash rents from growers of potatoes, carrots and snap beans allow traditional corn-and-soybean growers to reap additional profits while leaving the production and marketing to someone else.

For example, Larry Rice and his father, Art, raise corn and soybeans as they have for many years on Mammoth Grove Farms, their 2,700-acre operation near Centreville, MI. The Rices grow seed corn on about half of their acreage, most of which is under center-pivot irrigation. The remaining half is divided between soybean acreage and land rented out for carrot and potato production. They like to maintain all of the land in a four-year rotation among all the crops.

The Rices are part of a trend that has developed over the past several years, says Dale Hiatt, manager of IMC Agribusiness, a crop protection and fertilizer dealership in Mendon. "It started maybe five years ago and has really picked up steam in the last two or three years," Hiatt says. "Specialty crop growers from other areas, say around Saginaw or northern Ohio, are aggressively leasing land in southwest Michigan."

These specialty crop growers seek land free of insects and diseases that plague their home areas, like potato beetle and potato blight. They are willing to pay double the usual cash rent for good farmland. "The land here is extensively irrigated and because it is sandy soil, it can be harvested in a timely fashion, even after receiving an inch of rain," Hiatt says.

To take advantage of the specialty crop growers' business, local farmers must maintain planting flexibility, Hiatt and Larry Rice say. That flexibility is particularly important since most processors do not offer contracts until between December and March. "Circumstances can change very fast," Rice says. "Depending on the availability of seed corn contracts, we can make more or less land available for potato or carrot production."

That's why choosing a weed control program with few rotation restrictions is important. Rice says early postemergence application of Pursuit herbicide with Pinnacle herbicide for enhanced control of lambsquarters is a very effective weed control program that he has used in soybeans. Last year, the Rices tried new Raptor herbicide and found it fit their rotational needs. Raptor is an early-postemergence herbicide that provides broad-spectrum contact and residual control of 43 grasses and broadleaf weeds while allowing 30 different crops to be safely planted the following season.