Barnes Farming Corporation and
FARMPAK Products, Inc.

www.farmpak.com

Carson Barnes Carson, the son of a small Nash County, NC tobacco farmer, had absolutely nothing to his name when he started farming in 1960, growing 8 acres of tobacco and 0.3 acre of sweet potatoes. Under Carson's leadership, the Barnes Farming family-owned corporation has grown to become one of the nation's largest vegetable growers.

It was only through the kindness of a local man’s financial backing that Carson – at age 25 - was able to purchase a small farm and a used tractor near Macedonia, NC. At that time, he pegged in his plants, dug them up at harvest time, brushed and washed them by hand, and loaded them on a ’51 pickup truck to peddle at local stores. That first year, he grossed a little over $10,000 from his crops.

The very next year, Carson and his wife, Maxine, found an individual willing to sell them a farm on a 10-year financing basis. To make ends meet from an operating standpoint, they received help from the Farmers Home Administration, only after having been turned down by 3 financial institutions.

In 1969, just 9 years after he started farming, Carson grew 800 acres of sweet potatoes and 200 acres of tobacco and grossed about $1 million in farm sales. That was also the year he formed Farm Pak Products, Inc. and built a 45,000-square-foot packing plant along with his business office. FarmPak provides sweet potatoes for grocery, produce and foodservice outlets across the country. Its packing operation includes 12 lines and is one of the most modern vegetable packing firms in the US with refrigeration capacity for 400 truckloads of sweet potatoes. FarmPak's temperature-controlled storage facilities will accommodate one million bushels.

Within the next 10 years, Carson Barnes was a success story, owning or renting a network of farms in Nash County, totaling more than 2,000 acres of tobacco, sweet potatoes, and pickled cucumbers.

By 1984, Carson’s sweet potato farming and Farm Pak Products packing/shipping operation were the largest in the nation. At that time, the operation included between 2,500 and 3,500 crop acres on farms in Nash and Wilson counties. By then, Carson had sweet potato customers in 40 U.S. states, Canada, and Puerto Rico and had started his international trade with sweet potato sales to Great Britain.

Over the next 20 years, under Carson’s leadership, the Barnes Farming family-owned corporation has grown to become one of the nation’s largest vegetable growers. For the past 12 consecutive years, Barnes Farming Corp. has been listed among the Top 100 U.S. Vegetable Growers in American Vegetable Grower magazine. Today, Barnes Farming has operations in 5 eastern North Carolina counties, with ownership and control over 14,000 prime, cultivated acres. In 2004, Barnes Farming is growing over 5,000 acres of sweet potatoes, 800 acres of flue-cured tobacco, 1,100 acres of pickled cucumbers, and 700 acres of wheat. Barnes Farming also rents out land to other farmers, who grow cotton and peanuts.