SALISBURY, Md. — Frank Turano stalks among clumps of leafy sugar beet plants in a field about the size of a tennis court. He is on the hunt for flaws and having an easy time of it.

He presses his fingertips into a mushy beet half-buried in the mud and suffering from root rot. A few paces away, he folds open a leaf on a stunted specimen to reveal a plague of dark spots, a tell-tale sign of a fungus called cercospora.

"As a breeder, I like that," Turano says. "That's our competition."

The beet plants bred by his company, meanwhile, appear to be largely free of disease. And they're producing tubers up to twice the size of the commercial varieties growing in the same rows.

Turano, the head scientist for the Baltimore-based Plant Sensory Systems, is partnering with the University of Maryland Eastern Shore to test a potential business opportunity for Delmarva farmers. If the collaboration can single out a beet variety that thrives in the peninsula's heat and humidity, it could become the area's newest cash crop, proponents say.

Beets account for just over half of the sugar produced in the United States. Turano has a different destination in mind for his beets: jet fuel tanks.

The nonprofit steering the experiment, Frederick-based Advanced Biofuels USA, received nearly $17,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in September to conduct the work. The main goal is to provide a financially feasible alternative to corn in the ethanol market, said Joanne Ivancic, Advanced Biofuels' executive director.

In the U.S. biofuel market, corn is king. But it also is an important part of the world's food supply. That has triggered concerns that fuel demands may drive up the cost of corn, prompting food shortages.

Enter sugar beets, or rather "energy beets," as some like to call them.

One of the group's other goals is to encourage investment in ethanol refineries and other infrastructure along the supply chain that would bring beets to gas stations across the country. In the meantime, the researchers are focusing on a market that already exists.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has set a goal of getting half of the fuel for the Navy's ships and aircraft from renewable sources by 2020. Millions of dollars in investments later, Navy test pilots in early September accomplished a huge first, flying a jet powered by 100 percent biofuel.

The historic flight took place just across the Chesapeake Bay at Naval Air Station Patuxent River. As Ivancic sees it, Delmarva farmers could be supplying energy to Navy installations across the heavily fortified mid-Atlantic region.

Plant Sensory Systems is testing 25 varieties in the small patch. UMES graduate students helped plant the first crop April 19. By early October, a glance at the field could easily discern the winners from the losers.

"This is one of our varieties," Turano says, folding himself in half above a cluster of beet plants. "Look at how green and lush they are."

Turano, a former George Washington University professor, said beets traditionally have been grown in North Dakota and elsewhere in the upper Midwest. They prefer warm days and cool nights. The key to breeding commercially viable varieties in the mid-Atlantic and Florida, where he also is conducting experiments, will be to develop resistance to fungi, he said.

Later, with a few scoops of a shovel, he unearths some of the beets and scoots them by wheelbarrow to a table beneath a nearby shade tree. There, students and private researchers clean the tubers, remove their leafy tops and weigh them.

Then it's on to Bob Kozak's orange folding table. His company, Atlantic Biomass, is leading the effort to convert the beets into ethanol. He uses industrial-grade food processors to dice the beets so he can determine their sugar content.

The university has a larger role than supplying manual labor and land. Its researchers are analyzing how much phosphorus the beets' deep roots soak up from the nutrient-rich earth, said Caleb Nindo, a food science researcher at UMES.

Excess nutrients are a scourge for area farmers. For generations, many farmers spread chicken manure as fertilizer with little regard to the amount they put on the land. Whatever nutrients their crops couldn't absorb simply ran off into nearby waterways and into the bay, diminishing its health.

New regulations are restricting how much they can spread, even forcing them to stop the practice on some fields. So, finding ways to relieve the peninsula's phosphorus glut has risen to a top research priority at the Princess Anne university.

Nindo said he will be interested to see which method gets the most results: leaving the beets in the field longer to soak up more phosphorus, tilling the spent plants into the soil as future fertilizer or using the plants as material for waste-to-energy facilities.

Beets are winners when it comes to making energy. An acre of corn can produce about 430 gallons of ethanol while the same amount of sugar beets can yield up to 750 gallons, studies show.

The difference can largely be attributed to the difference in size between a typical corn cob and a sugar beet, experts say. Healthy beets can resemble oblong cantaloupes, providing more bang for a grower's biomass buck.

The cost of converting beets to ethanol, though, traditionally has been about twice that of corn. So, to compete with oil, the researchers toiling on the edge of UMES's campus know they will have to do better than 750 gallons per acre.

With oil selling for around a meager $50 a barrel, as it is now, their beets will have to produce 1,000 gallons per acre to be economically competitive, Kozak said. After the first two harvests, the UMES beets are producing at a rate just shy of 900 gallons, he said.

"If we're that close, we're going to be able to achieve it," Kozak said. "That tells me this is a damn good product. This could bring wealth to the Eastern Shore."

Follow Jeremy Cox on Twitter: @Jeremy_Cox