2024 Top Producer of the Year Finalist PJ Haynie: Advocacy And Tenacity

No step is too big for Top Producer finalist, PJ Haynie. Deep family roots are the foundation of his farming legacy. 

“My family lineage dates back to my great-great-grandfather, who was the first African American to come out of slavery and purchase 60 acres of land on Sept. 14, 1867, in Northumberland County, Virginia,” Haynie says.

Today, his family still owns and operates a portion of that land, which is now spread across four counties in the northern neck of Virginia and near the Chesapeake Bay. His accomplishments led to be named a finalist for Top Producer of the Year, which is sponsored by BASF, Case IH, and Rabo Agrifinance. 

“I spent a lot of time with my dad, and I was his walking shadow,” Haynie says. “And I tell folks that my dad tricked me into farming, you know, as I was on the floor, carpet farming with my toys, I matriculated to the bigger toys, the real ones.” 

He started driving at age seven and by 10 replaced a 40-year-old hired hand. After graduating from Virgina Tech, Haynie returned to the family operation looking to build a future with a focus on technology and improving efficiency. 

“Instead of planting from sunup to sundown, dad would say, ‘Hey, you can take that bubble on that roof, and you can work half the night, can’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ So, he said, ‘I will get you into big fields, so you can work the night, and that way, you know, it increased our productivity with the equipment by being able to work longer days and longer hours,” Haynie says.  

Today, as one of five kids, he and his four sisters still work together on the farm. But in 2010, while helping start and run a nonprofit called the National Black Growers Council, Haynie found himself in the Arkansas Delta. 

He tells the story of how he and his father thought about the expansion. 

“If we had a farm down south, we could probably start planting three to four weeks before we start here in Virginia,” Haynie says. “And with the equipment, we have our own trucks, let's haul a tractor and a planter down and some equipment down, get it done, and then bring it back up to Virginia to spread the cost of that equipment over more acres.”

Sixteen hours and a thousand miles from home, Haynie went to work, building a satellite operation in Phillips County Arkansas, roughly 25 miles west of the Mississippi River. 

“Here in the Delta, we have a lot of flat land,” he says. “And that's a little different than the landscape in Virginia.”

No rolling hills and natural drainage, instead Haynie's learning to plant on raised beds and furrow irrigate. It also opened the door to his newest endeavor: restarting an abandoned rice mill.

“When we went to this facility, we saw a diamond in the rough; we saw an opportunity,” he says. “A state-of-the-art facility that was constructed brand new in 2016 that had close to 4,000-bu. storage capacity and the milling capacity. They processed about 22 metric tons of rice per hour.”

Today, he's running the nation's only Black-owned rice mill.

“As a commodity farmer, no matter how much corn or wheat or soybeans that I grow that are for feed, you can't directly take that home and feed it to your family,” Haynie says.

And thanks to new USAID contracts, he's helping feed the world. It's a mission he takes seriously as a farmer and a member of the Black row-crop farming community. 
 
“You know, in 1920, there were a million Black farmers in this country, and African Americans owned 16 million acres of land. Present day, there are less than 15,000 Black row crop farmers, and less than 2 million acres of Black-owned land. And if we don't continue to keep our foot on the gas, Black men and women in row crop production agriculture are going to be extinct.”

It's a mission he's working to fulfill every day. 

“I'm hoping that my interest in my advocacy work, will show others in the country and other young men, who I was in their shoes one day, that through hard work and tenacity and faith, the opportunities can come your way,” he says.

Congratulations to PJ Haynie, a finalist for the 2024 Top Producer of the year.