As relatives and neighbors scoured their Dakota County fields for something -- anything -- they could salvage Friday afternoon, La Xiong surveyed the rented 18-acre plot that once sprouted a cornucopia of vegetables: beans, tomatoes, potatoes, zucchini, broccoli, corn, onions, lettuce and bell peppers. It's all gone, he said; all but the occasional stray potato or pepper that will be gathered up to sell for a pittance.
The peppers were pocked with holes, the lettuce was shredded, the broccoli sliced off as cleanly as if it had been cut with a knife. Stalks of corn lay bent and torn, or stood like tilted masts in pools of water. Thursday afternoon's thunderstorms tore a vicious path through this area that includes Coates and Rosemount, pounding it with hail and wind, and deluging it with torrents of rain. It also wrecked the family vegetable plots of scores of Hmong-American farmers, those same farmers who keep Twin Cities' farmers markets well-stocked with fresh produce.
"We don't even know where to start," said Xiong, who with his father and mother, and wife, Mai Song Lee, farm the plot. "It's too late to replant this." Though Xiong and his wife have other jobs and live in St. Paul, they and Xiong's parents sank about $20,000 into seeds for planting this spring, and will see that investment blown away by the storm. They have no insurance.
"We never thought this would happen," he said.
Xiong's parents, who moved to the United States in 1980 and have been farming garden plots ever since then, were especially hard hit by the loss.
"I've never seen my parents so sad in my whole life," he said.
State Sen. Mee Moua, DFL-St. Paul, was out Friday inspecting the damage to the vegetable plots. She estimated that a concentration of about 150 Hmong vegetable farmers work plots in the area and that about 100 of those were hit hard by the storm.
"In my estimate, 90-95 percent of the crops were wiped out," she said. That includes heavy damage to the plot close to Highway 52 that her mother and sister work.
