A Virginia food bank and a farmer cultivate an innovative alliance

On a recent stifling 90-degree morning, Bobby Woolard, director of logistics for the Foodbank of Southeastern Virginia and the Eastern Shore, showed his fellow workers how to look for ears with corn silk turned brown and shriveled, ready for harvest.

They slogged down row after row, bending, plucking and tossing corn into plastic crates. Annette Copeland, a truck driver, supplied the soundtrack from a portable speaker with Miles Jaye crooning “I’ve Been a Fool for You.”

“Anything that makes you move,” she said.

When the bucket of his tractor was full, Barnes ferried the corn to a refrigerator truck idling nearby.

He is 68, a fourth-generation farmer. This was the hottest and wettest July he could remember. The downside was that he couldn’t haul his trailer through the mud, slowing the harvest. The upside is this field would yield 27,500 pounds of corn.

That’s a sweet harvest for the food bank in the first year of a partnership with Barnes to grow produce for its 170 partner agencies and food hubs.

Some food banks have purchased fruits and vegetables directly from farmers. A Maryland program uses federal funds to pay competitive prices and grants for new crops and equipment to local farmers. A food bank in Massachusetts has purchased more than 200 acres and contracts with local farmers who share some of the harvests.

But the partnership with Barnes is different. He’s growing corn as part of a barter. The food bank leased 20 acres of land down the road from the state police station in Courtland, about 15 miles from the North Carolina border. Produce from half that land goes to the food bank. Barnes uses the other half as he desires.

Their collaboration is about more than supplying fresh food. Christopher Tan, who joined the food bank as chief executive officer and president last year, said he wanted to support a minority farmer and a way of life that has nearly disappeared. Black farmers are only 1.4 percent of the total in the United States, down from 14 percent in 1920, according to the Agriculture Department.

The partnership also is in line with the farm-to-table movement. “The whole point of the project was to hopefully help out a minority farmer in our local community, but also connect people with fresh produce grown by local citizens,” Tan said.

The idea germinated when Tan decided to learn about his new job by shopping with clients. One was a young mother who happened to be a farmer. “It struck me like, ‘Hey, wait a minute. These are people that are supplying our community’s food, and they need our assistance,’” he said.

His first idea was to buy produce from local small farmers. He soon learned that would be too expensive. Next, he tried to buy land. That also was beyond his reach. When the food bank opened a new facility in nearby Franklin, he connected with the Rev. Eric Majette of New Life Church Global, which had owned the land for years.

Marshall Rabil, director of marketing at the Hubbard Peanut Co. in Southampton County, had been encouraging Tan to learn more about local agriculture. He introduced Barnes.

Barnes, Tan learned, had stories to tell — oh, did he have stories. And he knew how to tell them.

Barnes, the son of a sharecropper, first got on a tractor when he was 6. Day after day, he’d hop off the school bus, change clothes, and head to the fields.

Barnes left home and his five siblings to attend auto and diesel mechanic school in Nashville. When he returned, he began working as a pipe fitter at the paper mill in Franklin and ran an auto repair business on the side.

The tractor he was driving on harvest day was testimony to that business — a hybrid vehicle with an engine, rear end and transmission all from other tractors. The canopy that kept the sun at bay was salvaged from a junkyard. Barnes welded it in place.

Those aren’t all his skills. On Sundays, he drives across the North Carolina border to pastor a church.

“My father said you got to have your hands in a lot of things just to make it,” he said in a commanding voice perfect for the pulpit. “And I do.”

When he married in 1976, he told his wife he intended to farm again. She wanted nothing to do with it. By 1989, he’d saved enough money to buy land. But it wasn’t easy.

When he sought a loan, he said the bank officer told him they didn’t finance farms. But two friends — both White — had recently secured loans to buy farmland from the same place. Barnes confronted the loan officer, and that day he had the money to begin Pop Son Farm.

For 15 years, Barnes put in a full day at the paper mill and then went home and worked the fields, sometimes for four or five hours a night. In 2004, he had a knee replacement. The mill couldn’t find another suitable job while he recovered, so he left. A disability plan continued paying part of his base salary until he turned 65.

Now, he lives on and tends to the 35 acres he purchased in 1989 and another 35 acres 15 miles away that he bought with his brother in 2020. His father had farmed that land and put it in his grandmother’s name when he left to fight in World War II. Barnes is not clear how, but it eventually fell into other hands.

He has grown just about everything — watermelons, cabbage, collards, broccoli, cantaloupe, soybeans. But he’s best known for peanuts, the prized Virginia variety. Barnes revived the practice of shocking — hanging freshly harvested bunches on poles to cure naturally.

The modern drying and curing process created in the 1960s takes just hours, while his traditional method takes as long as six weeks. The reward is flavor. “They cure sweet as compared to heat-dried peanuts,” Barnes said.

Rabil saw a report about his method and partnered with Barnes to sell “Single Origin Redskins” online and at Hubs Vine, the company’s restaurant and store in Franklin. “It has been nothing short of a miracle and a blessing to have somebody to take a chance on you after all these years,” Barnes said.

Barnes’s equipment is nearly as old as he is. Some, like the seed spreader used in May, he designed and fabricated himself.

He has no interest in sitting back and letting GPS guide a modern tractor. “My dad said anybody can hold a steering wheel, but you need to learn how to drive,” he said, “seeing what’s ahead of you, knowing the changes in the topography and when to slow down and speed up.”

Barnes often works alone. In May, readying the field fallow for 25 years, Barnes went back and forth over several days plowing, the last time at 4:30 a.m. just before planting. That afternoon, he went home to retrieve a tank so he could spray an herbicide. The next day he made three trips an hour away to retrieve bags of fertilizer because his trailer couldn’t hold enough in a single trip.

“I don’t stop,” he said. “Stopping is not an option because there’s nobody to do what I’m doing. Once you get going, you get going.”

Tan said Barnes was hesitant at first, thinking the food bank offer was too good to be true. “He really went out on a limb with us,” Tan added. “We’re so appreciative. I think it couldn’t have worked out better.”

About 150 volunteers picked the rest of the corn over a couple of days earlier this month. Because of the late start, Barnes only planted 7.3 acres of corn for the food bank and 5.3 acres of peanuts for himself. He refused to wait until next year. “I just couldn’t see them go through a whole year and not have something viable to show for it,” he said.

Now that the picking has ended, Barnes will get back on his tractor and begin tilling under the stalks to prepare for a fall planting of cabbage, broccoli and collards. One crop follows another, year after year, as much a culture and a calling as it is a business.

“You gotta do what you do,” he said. “And then you gotta love what you do to keep on doing what you do.”