Enjoy Hampton Farms peanuts during ‘7th inning stretch’

North Carolina lacks a Major League Baseball franchise, but the Old North State has a presence in all 30 big league ballparks in the United States and Canada.

 

Hampton Farms, the brand owned by Severn Peanut Company in Northampton County, N.C., is the primary supplier of in-shell peanuts to Major League Baseball stadiums, selling more than 4 million bags of peanuts a year in professional ball parks.

 

This is one of the reasons why G. Dallas Barnes, company president, was selected in 2024 as a North Carolina State University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award winner.

Barnes (Class of 1978) majored in agronomy. He enrolled at NC State in Raleigh as a third-generation peanut grower from Severn, N.C. (population 175), hoping to gain some knowledge about farming that he could carry back home to apply within the family business.

He said his involvement with a campus ministry association helped solidify his faith and proved to be as valuable as any class that he took as a student.

Armed with a bachelor’s degree, Barnes returned home only to be instructed by his parents to learn the business from the ground up, both literally and figuratively. He did as he was told.

In 1992, Barnes became CEO of Meherrin Agricultural and Chemical Company, which had been formed in 1958 as the parent company for Severn Peanut Company and the Hampton Farms brand, as well as seven other subsidiaries that provide a broad range of agriculture-related products and services to U.S. farmers.

 

(The selection of the name “Meherrin” has a story attached to it. The community of Severn was settled in the early 1830s and originally named Meherrin, after a local Native American tribe. In 1887, a branch rail line of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad was built through Meherrin. The town was incorporated in 1919 and named for Severn Ayers, a prominent local citizen and a stockholder of the railroad.)

Dallas Barnes and his wife, Patty Smith Barnes, have nine children. Five are now working at Meherrin, along with some of their cousins, learning various aspects of the business, reported Alice Manning Touchette, a communications officer at NC State.

 

“Barnes’ call to faith at NC State has stayed with him,” she wrote. “In 2017, he established Meherrin On Mission – a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving families through mission projects, disaster relief and educational scholarships.”

“Combining the two things he was called to do, Barnes integrates faith with business,” Touchette said. “His principles drive practices that help care for his employees, community and the next generation of agriculture and life sciences leadership” at NC State.

“I approach my work not just as work, but as worship,” Barnes says. “I’m called to be in the workplace and in this agriculture industry, but I’m doing it to honor the people of our community and my creator.”

Touchette concluded: “Barnes’ advice to young people is ‘to find what you are called to do, and do it well, to the best of your ability, and to the glory of God. It is never about yourself, or what you accomplish; it’s about serving others.’”

Here’s a trivia question from the National Peanut Board in Atlanta, Ga. Which Major League Baseball club routinely offers the “true taste of the South” – boiled peanuts – at its ballpark concession stands? 

It’s the Tampa Bay Rays.

 

Several minor leagues have taken on “alternate identities” or “alter-egos,” as a gimmick to build fan interest. The Charleston (S.C.) RiverDogs, the Single-A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays, occasionally becomes the Charleston “Boiled Peanuts.”