This year, we did our 8th annual Kudzu Root Camp a little differently. Instead of including an educational workshop in with the harvesting, processing, and celebrating of kudzu, we focused on research and development of our processes, mechanizing some steps and quantifying inputs and yields. And develop the processes we did! We were able to clean, shred, and rinse the starches out of the roots all using cheap and widely available electric tools. We’ll report back soon in more detail and share some photos.

Besides making leaps and bounds in our efficiency, we also got a better sense of the commercial viability of a variety of kudzu products we’ve been working with, and a sense of the potential. We measures out a 150 sq. ft. area and tracked the root yield from this section of the patch: it came out to about 300lbs of roots. That’s 2 lbs per square foot!

You can find some photos and follow a bit of what we’re up to on our Instagram: @kudzuco_op