At Large

Indeed, the Gwaltneys, and about 200 other farmers, are continuing a more-than-160-year-old tradition in southeast Virginia, one that has left an indelible mark on the region’s landscape and culture. It’s hard to miss: the country stores, weathered lettering and all, pawning peanuts to passersby; the level, gray fields stretching to distant tree lines, full of neat rows of bright peanut plants; the aged brick processing plants in downtown Suffolk and the modern facilities that have replaced them. Literally and figuratively, the peanut has deep roots in the fields and towns in this part of the state—chiefly the counties of Dinwiddie, Greensville, Prince George, Sussex, Surry, Isle of Wight and Southampton and the city of Suffolk. “I have peanuts growing this year in a field that belonged to my great-great-grandfather,” says Kevin Monahan, who farms near the town of Dendron in Surry County. “There’s a family tradition here, and peanuts are something that I enjoy growing and harvesting. It requires a lot of time and labor, but there’s nothing like the smell of green peanuts in the field at harvest time.”

But tradition only partly explains the endurance of this annual crop, even as the peanut industry has been battered in recent years by oversupply and lower prices. Quality drives demand for any product, agricultural or otherwise, and few dispute the fact that Virginia, while only the ninth-largest American producer of peanuts by number of acres planted, makes some of the best peanuts in the world. Of the four types of peanuts grown in the United States—Valencia, Runner, Spanish and Virginia—the last is most highly prized for its extraordinarily large kernels.