This past week, Curtis Wolfarth arrived at a field in southern Virginia Beach to see a family examining the giant combine he uses to harvest soybeans for Bonney Bright Farms.
“Well, you might as well come on and get in and ride with me and really learn something about it and watch how it works,” he recalled telling them.
After school on Wednesday, Wolfarth saw them waiting at the edge of a field while he cut beans. He steered the combine their way, swung it around and stopped. Two children climbed from the field up to the cab.
Robert Herron, an attorney, watched while his children rode with the farmer.
“We see them every year, both planting and sowing in the spring and summer, depending upon the timing, and then every fall we see the combines harvesting,” Herron said. “And this year one of them asked, ‘How does it work?’”
They had watched videos online and later saw the combine parked in a field. They decided to look closer. That was the day they met Wolfarth.
On Wednesday, the children saw why a combine earns its name: It does a few tasks together – gathers, threshes and separates.
Through the cab’s windshield, the children watched as the combine cut plants carrying pods containing beans and brought them in. Looking out the cab’s back window, they saw beans enter the grain tank.
Chaff fell to the cleared earth and a dusty haze rose.
“Obviously, it’s a pretty impressive piece of machinery whether you’re a kid or an adult,” Herron said.
After the ride, the children climbed down to the field.
“I wondered how it breaks the bean from the shell, and I wondered how it separates it because there’s no AI machine in there,” 11-year-old Bella said.
“I thought it was really cool,” 10-year-old Robbie said. “I just wanted to see what it would be like on the inside of the tractor.”
The harvest continued for Wolfarth that afternoon.
He’s lived here his whole life, farming for decades, mostly grain crops and strawberries. Now he’s the farm manager for Bonney Bright Farms. He guided the combine toward a truck already filled with soybeans. Some will become oil and feed. Others are bound for Indonesia.
“If we don’t do something to help educate them, teach them about food, how it gets on the plate … somebody’s got to be our leaders one day," he said about the children. “We’ve got to be the ones to help them. …
“I had a young man just like these two kids today, was watching me, and the boy was standing, riding his bicycle, and he stood there in the field,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Hey.’”
He told the boy he should learn how to drive it rather than just looking.
Keith Starke was 8 then. He wasn’t from an agricultural background but lived near a farm in the Bayside area. He used to ride his bike to see the machines and watch Wolfarth and Wolfarth’s grandfather, A.C. Brown, work that land.
“I was enamored by it,” Starke recalled, reached by phone in North Carolina.
He later worked for Brown and Wolfarth for years.
“Looking back on it,” Starke said, “they were mentors to me and they fed something I didn’t even know was brewing in the sense of how passionate I was about agriculture and farming and the community of farming.”
He studied agronomy in college. More than a decade ago, he reconnected with Wolfarth and gave him a copy of his master’s thesis. It’s dedicated to Wolfarth and his family.
Starke worked as a horticulture agent in Virginia Beach and with the agriculture department. Now, he’s the superintendent of a 523-acre research farm that’s part of North Carolina State University and he's finishing his doctoral degree in weed science.
Starke is grateful for Wolfarth’s invitation long ago.
“It changed my trajectory in ways that I didn’t understand,” he said.
