Cooperative Living October 2020 - 17

History: The Peanut's
Journey in Virginia
Source: Virginia-Carolinas Peanut Promotions
a bloom, there's a budding ovary
known as a peg, which finds its way
into the ground and starts to mature -
a legume.
Then it's a matter of keeping fungus
in Virginia totaled $24.2 million in
2019, according to the U.S. Agriculture
Department. As Jimmy Laine can tell
you, that adds a whole new meaning
to the term " working for peanuts. "
Laine's father-in-law started
Wakefield Peanut Co. more than
four decades ago in an old logging
building just south of the center of
Wakefield, population 830. It's not the
biggest operation in Virginia Peanut
Country - Birdsong Corp. in Suffolk
is the Microsoft of the industry -
but it's plenty big enough.
At peak time, Laine has 20 employees
in his family-run operation with
a cold-storage warehouse full of 1.3
million pounds of peanuts. A retail
store fronts the highway, though Laine's
son Steve says that end of the business
is more for marketing than profit.
" Over the years, we added a little
bit here and it's just a lot more than
I expected, " Jimmy Laine says with
a grin. " I never expected to get to
this point. "
THE PEANUT PROCESS
The Laines are the opposite of
middlemen. They begin and finish the
process. They produce seed for perhaps
100 growers, then take raw peanuts
from 15 farmers and turn them into
everything from honey-roasted peanuts
in a can to chicken feed.
The nitty-gritty intermediaries
are farmers like Parker, who seeds
his 25 acres in early May, dropping
future peanuts a few inches apart
in orderly rows.
Peanut plants shoot out of the
ground about a month later, 18 inches
tall with yellow blooms. Where there's
co-opliving.com
October 2020 | Cooperative Living | 15
Jimmy Laine explains
the production process
at Wakefield Peanut Co.
growth at bay and imploring the
weathercaster to deliver just the right
amount of precipitation - too little
and the plants won't prosper, too
much and they'll drown.
" This year, we started off with wet
conditions and then cool conditions.
So wet, cool conditions are not good
to put a peanut, or especially cotton,
through, " Parker says. " If you don't
control them early, you've got a problem
all year long, " he says.
Peanuts come in four basic types;
the Virginia peanut, though not grown
exclusively in Virginia, is typically
what you think of as a ballpark peanut.
It accounts for about 15% of U.S.
production. A variety known as Bailey,
developed at North Carolina State
University, has become a big-time
Peanuts were known as early as 950 B.C.
It is believed that they originated in Brazil
or Peru and were carried to Africa by early
explorers and missionaries.
performer because it does a better
job resisting disease and adverse
conditions.
The optimum peanut cycle runs
150-160 days, so in September, Parker
will harvest his crop with a peanut
digger that takes rows of peanuts, pulls
them up and inverts them. They'll sit,
shells exposed to the sun, for several
days before final collection.
" We'll put them in drying trailers,
carry them to our dryer, dry them
down to about 10% moisture or below,
and then take them back down to
Wakefield Peanut, where they started, "
Parker says.
THE EYE SEES ALL
Once upon a time, a group of
peanut checkers sat at a table in Laine's
operation as peanuts quickly passed
by, pulling ones that looked defective
or organizing them in some fashion -
(continued on page 16)
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Cooperative Living October 2020

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