About Sweet Clay

Sweet Clay was created by Sam McAlilly to help promote Mississippi farmers. Growing up eating sweet potatoes from Vardaman—the Sweet Potato Capital of the World—I've decided that there's something special about food grown in the red clay of the Mississippi hill country. All of these people ate food grown in that soil: Elvis, William Faulkner, Junior Kimbrough, Ida B. Wells, Jim Dickinson, Steve Holland, and more.

Our Mission

This holiday season is our first test: shipping organic sweet potatoes from Mississippi direct to consumer. We hope this is the beginning of a larger vision to support and strengthen Mississippi's food systems, starting with farmers in Mississippi's "sweet potato belt."

We're inspired by this story of selling vidalia onions online, and wanted to try the same idea for Mississippi sweet potatoes. The strong branding already exists for Vardaman sweet potatoes, so we're just trying to craft the Sweet Potato Capital of the World in a new light by selling to consumers directly.

Soil

William Faulkner wrote, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it."

The same is true for our food. Each sweet potato carries the story of its soil, its farmers, and the community that tends the land. As Wendell Berry reminds us, "The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life."

Sowing

Sweet Clay begins with holiday sweet potatoes, but our vision extends to creating a cooperative food system that supports Mississippi farmers and strengthens our regional food system.