A female farmer was stunned when she unearthed a monstrous 30lb sweet potato in her field that she said she could barely lift from the ground.

Phone footage shows the excited woman holding the massive vegetable that she dug up from her field in Yuncheng, in China's Shanxi Province.

The clip shows the elderly woman standing amid freshly dug-up soil with the gigantic root crop that is nearly half her height.

After weighing the freakishly large sweet potato, the woman revealed it weighed an impressive 30 lbs. She said she has never found anything similar to its size in her field before, adding that she and family use fertiliser to help the crops grow and no pesticides.

As it is apparently too big to be wasted on a single meal, the farmer said she plans on turning it into flour instead.

Believed to have originated in South America, sweet potatoes were reportedly first cultivated in tropical regions like Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. With the discovery of the New World by Columbus, sweet potatoes were brought back to Europe, spreading worldwide during the Age of Exploration.

In Asia, sweet potatoes were first introduced by European explorers to countries like the Philippines and Vietnam before being imported to China.