COLUMN ONE : Farm Belt Delivers the Frijoles : It pays to know beans, not to mention tortilla corn, in the Midwest. It’s a growing source of the crops that help meet the expanding demand for Latino foods in the U.S.

Long before a Cuban family in Miami can cook a pot of black bean soup or a Guatemalan family in Los Angeles can enjoy their frijoles parados, Dick Gremel stares at a frozen field here. He waits.

When spring comes and the wind from Lake Huron no longer bites cold and crisp, Gremel takes to his tractor. Across hundreds of acres, he plants seeds. At that moment, countless tropical meals are born--all thanks to a farmer who hadn’t even seen a black bean until recently.

“Last year the demand for black beans was so high that from now on we’ll grow them every year, no matter what,” says Gremel, 54, a third-generation farmer. “You have to produce what people want.”

Michigan is the nation’s leading grower of black beans. And with harvest approaching, farmers in the state’s fertile “thumb” have their fates linked more than ever to the culinary tastes of Cubans, Central Americans and others who prefer the coal-colored legume.

The change is just one of many spawned in U.S. agriculture by the nation’s growing Latino population and the popularity of their dishes, be they Caribbean moros y cristianos (black beans and white rice) or simply a salsa picante from Texas.

With bean farmers in Michigan tied more than ever to both the domestic and international Latino market, life in this region--settled a century ago by German and Polish farmers--has changed in many subtle but discernible ways.

“We’ve got a restaurant near us that serves a black-bean something pizza,” says Bob Green of the Michigan Bean Commission, based in the farming community of St. Johns. “And how many places have black bean soup? It’s really grown. Is it a yuppie thing? Is it a Mexican thing? Is it a Cuban thing? Yes, it’s all of the above.”

The old stereotypes about Latinos and beans--once the genesis of an ethnic slur--are giving way to a new image of the bean: hip, healthy and cosmopolitan.

The growing influence of Latin cuisines can be seen not only in the spread of traditional dishes like black bean soup and Salvadoran pupusas but also in uniquely American hybrids like “sun-dried tomato wraps.” A Southwestern hybrid of a Mexican favorite, salsa, years ago displaced catsup as the nation’s most popular condiment.

Once upon a time, the navy beans in “pork and beans” were the Michigan farmer’s bread and butter. But last year, farmers here grew 135,000 acres of black beans, more than navys or any other variety. It was the first time that had happened in the state’s 100-year bean-growing history. Domestic consumption of black beans has increased tenfold since the mid-1980s. Americans now eat more than 100 million pounds of black beans each year.

A similar explosion in pinto beans--”Taco Bell has really helped a lot,” one farmer says--has been a boon to North Dakota, the nation’s leading pinto producer. In the Red River Valley, straddling the North Dakota-Minnesota border into Manitoba, Canada, pintos have joined wheat and sunflowers as a big money crop.

To supply the burgeoning tortilla industry in California and Texas, a small but increasing number of farmers in Nebraska are growing white “food” corn, a trickier crop to raise than the standard “No. 2 yellow” used to feed livestock.

Routinely Flying the ‘Corn Shuttle’

O’Malley Grain of Fairmont, Neb., maintains a full-time bilingual salesman in Los Angeles. Company officials routinely fly what could be called the “corn shuttle”--Omaha to Los Angeles--to help drum up business in Southern California barrios.

“I was in East L.A., on the Hispanic side of town,” says Dale Byrkit, a native Nebraskan and O’Malley plant manager. “There’s a new tortilla place opening up every month out there. . . . All I had seen before was Disneyland.”

The Latino food boom has also brought a sharp increase in the production of chiles and tomatillos in California, says Victor Valle, a professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and author of “Recipe of Memory,” a look at the history of Mexican American cuisine.

“Mexican food and Latin food is becoming ubiquitous, but in two different ways,” he says. There are mass market “crossover” foods like the tortilla, he says, but also a growth in an “ethnic” market catering to Latino immigrants.

Perhaps the most dramatic example, he says, can be seen in the spice racks of chain supermarkets located in Latino neighborhoods. Some contain as many as 120 spices, including once obscure herbs like epazote, whose pungent aroma is similar to cilantro.

To help meet the demand for such products, Joe Perez, vice president of purchasing for New Jersey-based Goya Foods, one of the nation’s largest producers of Latino foods, scours the United States in search of the ingredients. Hardly anything is imported.

The rice in Goya’s boxes of arroz espanol comes from Arkansas, as does the hominy in Goya’s canned pozole. The bell peppers in Goya products like sofrito (an onion, pepper and spice base to many Latin dishes) are grown across the Sun Belt, from California to Florida. Goya’s black beans come from upstate New York and, of course, Michigan.

“We don’t buy from abroad because abroad is not consistent in quality,” Perez says.

Although people in the thumb of Michigan aren’t the kind to boast, they won’t argue with those who say Michigan black beans are the world’s best. In fact, most Michigan black beans are exported. A few Michigan farmers have visited farms in Mexico and South America to check out the competition and haven’t been much impressed.

Gremel went to Argentina in March and was surprised by the archaic farming practices. “When a guy wants to cultivate his field, he just hires 400 Indians.” Gremel and his three sons do the same work with a single tractor.

Last year, a group of Argentine farmers visited Gremel’s 3,200-acre spread, treading around his bean plants, gawking at his tractor, chattering in Spanish about his new and expensive combine.

“We’re not in a little world anymore,” Gremel observes. As if to prove the point, a computer terminal in his farm’s toolshed flashes weather reports and crop prices from places near and far. “It’s amazing how the world shrunk.”

Harvesting Will Begin This Month

Planting of black beans in Michigan begins in early June. By July, the stubby plants are growing in rows that stretch for as long as a mile. At first, they are distinguished from other beans by a single, striking characteristic: the purple veins in their green leaves. Later, they sprout purple blossoms.

This month, when the plants have grown to the height of a man’s thigh and the beans have dried sufficiently, harvesting will begin. Rivers of black beans soon begin to fill silos throughout Michigan’s thumb. They are destined, almost exclusively, for points south.

Nearly every Michigan bean shipper has a shelf in his office displaying Latino food products. There are cans with names like La Criolla, a brand whose syllables do not roll easily off the tongue of most people here. (Latinos make up only about 1% of the region’s population.)

“I grew up on a bean farm,” says Greg Varner, a research agronomist based near Saginaw. “My dad and my mother basically served us white beans our whole life. Now in my pantry I’ll have some refried beans and some black beans.”

In Frankenmuth, best known for its annual Bavarian festival, bean shipper Lyle Ackerman routinely sends off containers of “black turtles” to processing plants outside Los Angeles and New York.

Ackerman recently sent some split black beans to Guatemala. The low-quality leftovers, rejected by U.S. companies, are used in Central America to make “a puree product,” he says. When a visitor tells him the Spanish name of that Guatemalan staple--frijoles volteados--Ackerman gives a perplexed stare. He isn’t familiar with the term.

At the nearby Cooperative Elevator Co. in Pigeon, Mich., Mike Eisengruber routinely travels to Mexico City to lobby officials about opening up that country’s large market to more Michigan beans.

Mexicans grow up eating 30 to 40 pounds of beans per year. By contrast, Americans, on average, eat just 7.5 pounds of beans per year, he says. The figure has increased, however, about 25% in the last decade, reflecting both a demographic shift and the nation’s broadening palate.

“Before, we had [black beans] going mainly to New York to the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans and then to Texas and Arizona for the Mexican population,” said Green of the Michigan Bean Commission. “Now it’s all over the United States.”

With domestic canners demanding ever better quality, Cooperative Elevator has invested $4.5 million in a state-of-the-art facility to sort, polish, clean and pack blacks and other beans.

A large sorting machine with an electric eye can perform what seems, to an outsider, like a feat of magic: It can take 100 pounds of black beans and, in a few seconds, find and remove the single red kidney bean that has been mixed in by mistake.

Good processing, modern farming practices and Michigan’s wet, cool weather--which is somewhat similar to the highlands of Zacatecas in Mexico and Huehuetenango in Guatemala--together ensure the state’s reputation among black bean connoisseurs.

“People in Mexico say our Michigan beans are the best,” Eisengruber says.

In Nebraska, officials at O’Malley Grain make a similar pitch. They boast that people in Los Angeles and elsewhere who care about tortillas can taste the difference when they use Nebraska white corn.

Most large-scale manufacturers make their tortillas from corn flour. People who buy O’Malley corn get whole kernels that they cook in water to make masa, or dough.

“It’s like the difference between fresh milk versus powdered milk,” says O’Malley Vice President James L. Thomas.

“Anyone can make a corn flour tortilla,” adds salesman Lalo Espinosa. “But to make a fresh tortilla you have to be an expert.”

O’Malley ships the kernels, which look like pale yellow jewels, in 50-pound brown bags with a label that reads “el numero uno para masa.” The company’s Web site--www.omalleygrain.com--includes several pages in Spanish.

The company’s $4-million Nebraska facility represents something of a bet on the continued growth of the tortilla market. The Illinois-based business built it last year to cut down on shipping costs to the West Coast and Texas.

Customer Checks Out Nebraska Facility

One new customer, Vitalino Gonzales of Sofia’s Mexican Food of El Monte, Calif., checked out the new plant recently. A native of the Mexican state of Puebla, he stood about a foot shorter than all the tall, lanky Nebraskans guiding him around the silos and the rail terminal.

The Nebraskans offered to take him to see a nearby cornfield, but Gonzales politely declined.

“I know what corn looks like,” Gonzales said. Decades ago, before coming to the United States, he had grown corn in Puebla. “That’s how I got my start.” Now his company ships tortillas across California, from Santa Maria to Brawley.

After a few bilingual goodbyes, Gonzales got in a car and drove across the corn-covered plains to the airport for his flight back to Los Angeles.

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Bean Counters

In the United States, per capita consumption of black beans has soared.

In Michigan, acreage devoted to black beans has surpassed that of navy beans.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture.