BALTIMORE — A Baltimore food processor is seeking farmers on Delmarva to grow one of its key ingredients: horseradish. Phil Tulkoff, president of Tulkoff Food Products said Delmarva’s sandy soil and typical cold snap during the winter make it a good fit for growing the root crop.

He said he sources the bulk of the millions of pounds of horseradish the company uses annually from growers in Collinsville, Ill., an area near St. Louis that grows about 60 percent of the world’s crop. He said last year’s spring flooding in the midwest sent him scrambling to other areas to fill orders when Illinois growers couldn’t plant their crop. He went to Canada and even Europe to try to fill his need but still came up well short of what they had planned to grind into puree for its sauces and other products.

That ordeal, combined with ever-increasing freight charges and more growers retiring without another generation coming in, motivated Tulkoff to try to cultivate local options.

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