July 2017 — Rhyne Cureton will be a junior at NC A&T University this fall majoring in Agricultural Education, after taking a gap year to explore his interests in agriculture. During his first two years in college, he discovered that he not only loved the outdoors, but was also fascinated with agriculture and its role in many different sectors including sustainability, economics, education, and energy. Over the past year, he raised hogs and other animals at World Hunger Relief, Inc. in Waco, Texas, worked with the National Pork Checkoff program, and worked on small scale pork production at Fickle Creek Farm in Efland, NC.
As an apprentice with Foster Caviness this summer, Rhyne has been helping with quality control in the warehouse, doing customer service calls to clients, as well as working with accounting and record keeping – experiences that he says have helped him recognize how important it is in business to be organized and keep things up to date, flowing, and neat.
Rhyne eventually wants to start his own farm, and become large enough to sell wholesale. This apprenticeship has helped him understand what it is like from the distributors perspective. With prior experience in several different areas of the local food supply chain, Rhyne was looking for an opportunity to fill in the gaps in his experience, he explained, “Advocacy I have done, councils and policy making…I have been a part of. But what does it mean to be a wholesaler? If I want to be a bigger scale wholesale farm, I need to have an understanding of what exactly I would be getting into.”
This article originally appeared in the June/July 2017 NC Growing Together Newsletter.