Made in Suffolk

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022 | PAGE 1

DE IN A M

Suffolk 2022

Suffolk News-Herald Sunday, February 27, 2022

PAGE 2 | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022

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SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022 | PAGE 3

Made in Suffolk

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All across Suffolk’s 420 or so square miles, there are people engaged in the business of making.

Whether it’s inventing a new item, designing and producing a piece of art, growing and processing a crop, cooking a recipe, even simply making their service-based business into something — everyone in Suffolk is a “maker” in some way.

We set out to highlight a few of those Suffolkians who are making things, and we found a variety of people to talk to.

As you peruse the pages, you will find entrepreneurs, farmers, industrial manufacturers, artists and more featured.

We hope you’ll be inspired to make something of your own after you read about your neighbors’ projects.

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PAGE 4 | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022

A buzzing bee business

BY TRACY AGNEW EDITOR

In only 20 years, Horseshoe Point Honey has grown from one beehive owned by Jan and Sean Kenny to a bustling business that is one of the larger producers of honey in Suffolk.

The Kennys got their first hive in 2002. Like many hobbyists, however, they weren’t able to stop at just one and eventually, it became a business.

“We were just kind of dabbling in it for a few years, as a kind of hobby,” Sean Kenny said. “With hobbies, you know, one turns into two and two turns into four. And then at the end of the year, you have all this honey and — you know, what do you do with it?

Jan Kenny believes it was in about 2006 that they first started selling their honey.

“We were getting more and more and more, and we were giving it away,” she said. “But then there was a point where we thought, ‘Hey, it does take a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of money.’”

Eventually they were approached at an arts festival by Westside Produce and Provisions,

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a Norfolk store that became the first store that stocked their products. Now there are 18 different retailers from Virginia Beach to Williamsburg that carry the items.

The Kennys have between 45 and 60 hives, not only on their property but also spread across several farms in the Chuckatuck area, producing about 2,000 pounds of honey a year. Sean works directly with the bees, while Jan bottles, labels and delivers honey and their other products.

There are beeswax candles as well as bee pollen, which is collected using traps on a couple of the hives that knock the collected pollen off the bees’ legs when they return to the hive.

“A lot of people are becoming more and more familiar with it,” Jan said, touting the health benefits and anti-allergen properties of the bee pollen. “It’s very earthy, and you just let it kind of let it melt in your mouth. I put it into yogurt.”

The business also sells raw beeswax for artists and leatherworkers and is beginning to dabble in wedding favors, making specially shaped candles for occasions.

One of the only challenges?

Keeping their products in stock.

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“We really want to be able to keep the honey all year long at the stores, so they don’t run out — especially because when they’re going to run out, it’s going to be in the spring when everyone wants it for their allergies,” Jan said. “I try to balance the sales with the amount of honey we have, and that’s very, very tricky.”

Both Kennys had a life before honey. She worked at Hope House Foundation for 25 years. Sean’s day job is at NASA Langley Research Center, where he’s worked for 32 years. He has translated a lot of his research knowledge to his bee business, where he pays close attention to monitoring colonies, keeping track of the family line of breeding queens, tracking the date that each type of tree blooms each year, and more.

Despite the fact that their business depends on thousands of six-legged critters, both Jan and Sean say they get immense satisfaction from the humans they encounter through their work.

“One of the things that inspires me is just the demand for the product,” Sean said. “The number of people that seek us out — not only for just generic, raw honey — but they seek out our particular brand because they believe it tastes better. We get a lot of really positive feedback about our products, and that’s something I find rewarding, because it’s hard work. To have people come back and comment about what they think of our product and to see businesses not just place that one order but have ordered from us for well over a decade — we’re doing something of value for not only their business but the community as a whole.”

Sean and Jan Kenny are the owners of Horseshoe Point Honey, a thriving apiary with anywhere from 45-60 hives at a time that are spread across much of North Suffolk. Sean Kenny takes care of the hives and gets a thrill out of keeping as much data as possible on his bees, honey production and local plant life cycles; Jan Kenny is on the business side of their buzzing biz, bottling and transporting honey, candles and other products to retailers.

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PAGE 6 | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022

Amadas helps with the harvest

BY JIMMY LAROUE STAFF WRITER

Peter Brock of Amadas works on some side frame welding on the shop floor of its Holland Road location. The shop floor bustles with activity as Amadas is known globally for its peanut harvesting equipment. It has been in business for nearly 60 years, dating back to 1963.

When Jonathan Graham is at a Little League baseball game, he’s like a lot of people who like to scarf down peanuts, but he also looks at the shells before eating them.

“When I’m out there, you get these bags of shells,” Graham said. “I always look to see if I can see a little bit of blue paint, Amadas blue paint on the side that scrubbed off, some tell-tale sign that I had something to do with that.”

Graham, an engineering manager with Suffolk-based Amadas, once thought he would move on after a couple of years and build race cars.

Instead, he’s helping engineer and build peanut harvesters, and he’s doing it at a place where he can walk out on the shop floor knowing everyone by name and knowing who they are not just as employees, but also as people.

“Peanut harvesting is our bread and butter to our company, and it’s a product that is manufactured right here in this little town of Suffolk, but it has far-reaching impacts,” Graham said. “We have a world market of peanut production and there’s Amadas

equipment on just about every continent except probably Antarctica where peanuts are not grown, but we have a presence everywhere. It’s a small, family-run company here.”

In a partnership with Suffolk Public Schools and the College and Career Academy at Pruden’s welding program, the company has also established a new internship opportunity for the next generation.

The company, which has been in business since 1963, relies on its employees to get its peanut-harvesting equipment to harvest for its customers, providing support for older machinery and making new equipment. He referenced the company’s origins in the partnership formed between Oliver K. Hobbs and J. Carlie Adams, combining engineering, manufacturing and marketing skills to produce peanut harvesting and processing machinery, developing new products over the ensuing decades as the company approaches 60 years in business, now producing equipment in Suffolk — at its headquarters off of Holland Road and at its location on Kenyon Road, as well as Albany, Georgia and Cordoba,

Argentina.

Though heavily rooted and specializing in products to harvest peanuts, Amadas does more than that.

“The peanut crop is something that we specialize in,” Graham said, “but many of our good customers that use our equipment are also growing other commodities such as cotton. There’s other row crops that require irrigation, and so we also have equipment that help support the cotton crop, the cotton industry, as well as, in general, irrigation, watering crops like tobacco and corn.

You may well see an Amadas Reel Rain irrigator watering crops this summer.”

He and the other Amadas employees have pride in seeing the company’s equipment in the nearby fields.

“We want to build machines that lead in their industry and have value for our customers,” Graham said. “We outsource as little as possible, and I think there’s a sense of pride, particularly within our group here, that that peanut harvester comes off of the assembly line, and it may very well go to a local farmer around here. … If they’re growing peanuts, I bet they have a piece of Amadas equipment.”

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Family farm small but making name for itself

BY JIMMY LAROUE STAFF WRITER

Dera Bradley, top, runs the 14-acre Bradley Family Farm off of White Marsh Road with her husband, Brian Bradley. The two have been operating the farm for four years, offering pastured pork it sells by retail cut such as bacon, ribs and sausage, along with chicken eggs, alpaca dryer balls and pecans, pears and sweet pickles.

At 14 acres and nearing 4 years old, the Bradley Family Farm off of White Marsh Road may not be large, and it may be young, but it packs a punch with what it is able to offer — pastured pork it sells by retail cut such as bacon, ribs and sausage, along with chicken eggs, alpaca dryer balls and the occasional pecans, pears and sweet pickles that come from the cucumbers it grows.

Brian and Dera Bradley do it despite not having a background in farming and each working full time jobs. None of that has stopped them from putting in the time to make it successful. They’re adding fencing in the back of their property so they can begin raising cattle.

“We didn’t come with the intention of doing a farm,” Brian Bradley said. “We wanted land. I wanted a shooting range, my wife wanted to get animals. Our plan wasn’t to become a farm, but we raised some hogs for ourselves and our family, and the meat is so much better than in the store. So we started to do it to sell.”

But keeping up with farm duties, even on a small one, can be a challenge, especially since they are not their only job. They have a couple of horses, a cow, some alpacas, pet mini-pigs and feeder pigs.

“We really enjoy the animals, but it does take a lot of time with us both working full time,” Brian Bradley said. “It’s hard for us to get to events.”

The Bradley Family Farm took part in the Farmer’s Market in Suffolk last summer, but was only able to go to a few of them because of their schedules.

“It’s made it tough and it’s made it difficult to acquire customers and get

our name out,” Brian Bradley said.

The farm uses Facebook and Google ads to get the word out, but the cost of advertising prevents them from doing much more than that. He said he’s had help from other local farmers who have become friends, along with researching any issues that come up.

Like many, they face challenges in fuel costs. On a recent trip to drop off three hogs at the Acre Station Meat Farm, where the processing is done, he was told that the cost of the smoking process has “gone way up — it went up substantially.” A related challenge comes in how to keep its prices down for customers while facing increasing farm-related costs.

It’s something he does every two to three months, and it takes six to eight months to grow out the pig and then they take it to the processor. It will have the meat for two-and-ahalf weeks to process, smoke and cure it, package it up in vacuum seal bags, freeze it up, and then he makes a return trip to pick it up and bring it back to the farm to be sold. Once sold, the farm will deliver their product all over Hampton Roads.

Still, it doesn’t prevent Brian Bradley from dreaming about something bigger for the farm — there are 164 acres surrounding his property that’s up for sale — and he would love to offer agritourism somewhere down the road. Neither plan on leaving their jobs before they retire, but they look forward to the farm’s growth. And, they’re satisfied with what they are able to do.

What satisfies them the most about what they do?

“The quality and the taste of the meat that we get to partake in and sell,” Brian Bradley said, “just that fulfillment of having a good quality food to provide, and then we get to enjoy it as well.”

PAGE 8 | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022

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PAGE 10 | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022

For Blanchard, painting is ‘a history of who I am’

BY JIMMY LAROUE STAFF WRITER

Elizabeth Blanchard’s oil paintings in her home are like a bit of a diary for her, capturing moments in time for her children and scenes she sees on her walks of faith.

But after doing art in high school and college, she decided on a different path.

“When it came down to what are you going to major in, and it was like, I like science, and I like art,” Blanchard said. “And I remember sitting with my counselor and he’s like, art and science, they’re a little bit different. But I felt like, well, I’m here to get a career, not to pursue a hobby.

And I just didn’t want to be an art teacher. So I went to the practical side and squeaked out a 2.0 (GPA) in biology and let it go aside.”

She got married right out of college “and then I just didn’t do it anymore,” until she felt a wave of unhappiness set in as she was feeling stress, homeschooling her children and doing little but managing them all day.

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“I should do one thing that’s just for me,” she recalled saying to herself. “And I tried to remember what that was. I had to really think about it. I was like, ‘Whoa, wait, I used to like to do art.’”

A friend of hers had suggested months before that they should take a class at the Suffolk Center for Cultural Arts, so they signed up for Robert Lemasters’ oil painting class, “The Joy of Painting.”

“I was so nervous,” Blanchard said. “I hadn’t been drawing, I hadn’t been doing anything. But it was immediately, I thought, ‘this is so great, and now I remember why I like it.’ And in fact, my first painting I had hung (is) by my easel over there. It’s the first painting that I did, and I had never oil painted before, either. It just kind of spiraled.”

She began teaching art for her co-op, God’s Homeschool Warriors, as an aide first and then as the teacher the following year, and then she taught art for three years at Suffolk Christian Academy. During this time she kept painting and going to class,

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022 | PAGE 11

but eventually, she wasn’t able to do so on a regular basis, and then came a surprise pregnancy at age 39 while teaching at SCA. So she went back to homeschooling her children and gave birth to her daughter, going to Lemasters’ classes when she could, and selling the occasional artwork.

When he became ill, she offered to cover any classes he missed, and eventually, he stopped showing up in the couple of weeks before he died. After that, someone else came in to teach the class for about six months before Blanchard resumed teaching it in September 2019, teaching it in the way he did.

“I wondered what would have happened if, when I was sitting in front of my counselor that day I had chosen art,” Blanchard said, “and I don’t

know, but I think that God had a plan for me to do it.”

Blanchard has painted a lot from photographs, but has been doing more plein air painting of late, in which she’ll start and, in most cases, complete a painting in a matter of hours. She said in those instances, she has to find her focus quickly and hone in on it. Her paintings are usually scenic, or they are of people, and she likes to paint in an alla prima, or wet on wet, style.

“I try to paint what I know,” Blanchard said. “It’s like a visual picture of my life. I paint my kids, and I paint my dog. It’s a history of who I am. I try to paint what I know.”

And though she dreams of being able to go to Italy and paint there, she appreciates the beauty in what can seem

like static scenes surrounding her home.

“I think this is what outdoor painting has captured for me,” Blanchard said. “Is that for me to go outside and to paint, I am very reflective on my relationship with God, on His handiwork inside of me. And creation is a big inspiration for me.

“Really, when I need to talk to the Lord, and I need to have time and I have something that’s on my mind or whatever, I would go for a walk. And so when I began to paint outdoors, it melded the two, studio work and being outdoors. And so I really want my work to grow in excellence, and I really want to hone in on what it is to make a painting worship and to capture things that I see that relates to me and my faith.”

Suffolk artist Elizabeth Blanchard says her oil paintings are “a history of who I am.” She has painted from photographs but has more recently taken to plein air painting, weathering the elements to complete a work of art within a matter of hours.

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PAGE 12 | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022

Suffolk barber makes it easier to cut hair

BY JIMMY LAROUE STAFF WRITER

Marrico Simpson established the company 4MAS Grooming Inc. for his patented CutBrush product.

Marrico Simpson has been cutting hair since he was a pre-teen and wanted to make it easier for others to take care of their hair in-between visits to the barber.

A friend of his had trouble holding the brush and cutting his hair at the same time, and Simpson, who owns the Suffolk barbershop and beauty salon Cut N’Shears at 148 Burnetts Way, Suite 111, came up with the now-patented idea to put a blade in the middle of the brush. And with the pandemic’s impact in curtailing in-person visits, he’s seen sales of his CutBrush product increase.

“Since the pandemic, it actually helped the sales,” Simpson said, “because the barbershops were shut down, and this tool was one that became a need. It’s a self-grooming tool, so the pandemic definitely helped boost our sales and people’s confidence to self-groom.”

He began the process of getting the patent for it in 2017 and finally received it in late 2019. In that time, he established the company, 4MAS Grooming Inc., for the product — the name standing for

the initials of his three daughters, Mallori A. Simpson, Madilyn A. Simpson and Maci A. Simpson.

Having the product has been key for him with not being able to have his barbershop open, and now that it can be open again, Simpson is not cutting hair at this time to reduce his risk of getting COVID-19 due to his chronic kidney disease, which had previously caused him to be medically discharged from the Navy after serving for 13 years.

Since then, he’s addressed issues with the comb attachment and increased the power of the motor with the brush. He also developed a similar brush to be used for pets and started selling that in 2021.

Both products are sold online on the Amazon and Walmart websites, and he’s targeting this year to get his products into retail stores and work on a new product tailored specifically for barbershops.

“It’s definitely worked out, Simpson said. “They want to cut their hair or trim their beard, and they have been able to do what they needed to do without having to go to a barbershop or a hair salon.”

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PAGE 14 | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022

The Neighborhood Harvest keeps growing

BY JIMMY LAROUE STAFF WRITER

The Neighborhood Harvest’s bulging 30,000 square-foot hydroponic greenhouse off of Turlington Road is teeming with various greens that go from there straight to people’s doorstep.

The sign off the road, Sweet Basil Farms, hints to its roots as a basil greenhouse — that started in 2012 — but with the coronavirus pandemic spurring a growth in food delivery services, it is in the exploratory stages of trying to find a larger location in the city, according to public relations manager Stephanie Fowler. It also hosts some of its operations in a 19,000-square-foot building at the Suffolk Industrial Park.

The Neighborhood Harvest partners with more than 40 regional farms, ranches, dairies and artisan food and beverage makers throughout the state, and over the past several years, has expanded its service area from Suffolk and Hampton Roads into Williamsburg, the metro Richmond area and Charlottesville.

It has also expanded its services to offer not only fresh, non-GMO, non-pesticide, Suffolk-grown greens,

which were in abundance on a recent visit to its greenhouse, but also, with those partnerships, it offers freerange chicken eggs, meats, vegetables, baked goods and craft beverages. More recently, as demand has increased, it has begun offering prepared meals through its Harvest Kitchen program.

“We’re proud to share just a little of what Suffolk has to offer with customers across Virginia,” said Thomas Vandiver, president of The Neighborhood Harvest, “and it’s an honor to deliver some of the best that Virginia has to offer back to our Suffolk residents.”

The Neighborhood Harvest got its start as an idea from Vandiver while he was studying at the Mason Business School at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg.

John Stein, one of the business’ co-founders who started Baker’s Crust restaurant, along with a partner of his at the time, Eric Coble, were teaching a class on entrepreneurship at the business school. They had an offshoot of Baker’s Crust, called The Crust, that employed college students, one of them being Vandiver, whose project idea for the class was hydroponic growing.

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At the end of the term, Stein and Coble approached Vandiver and asked if he wanted to start a greenhouse employing hydroponic growing principles. From growing herbs, they expanded into growing other greens such as lettuce. And, noticing that quality control was an issue for their product, they invested in their own delivery service to get things to customers faster and fresher, within 48 hours of harvest.

Most of its community farm partners are based in Virginia, though a few are in northeastern North Carolina and one, a dairy farm, is in southern Maryland. The Neighborhood Harvest employs nearly 60 people locally, ranging from office and greenhouse workers to delivery drivers and chefs.

But even as it grows, it takes the neighborhood in The Neighborhood Harvest seriously.

Someone local answers all of its calls and emails.

And it expects to continue grow-

ing, even as grocery stores have expanded their own home delivery services during the pandemic. The Neighborhood Harvest believes it can differentiate itself through a fresher, healthier product that is priced competitively, if not less expensive, than what can be found in stores.

“The pandemic really transformed home delivery from a luxury to a necessity,” Fowler said.

“And we saw that at the beginning of the pandemic. Customers came to us in droves when they found out what we were doing because we were already doing home delivery before the grocery stores and other places were. Now, the challenge is, the market is more flooded. They do have all the grocery stores and other vendors doing home delivery now. But there’s often a huge disparity in quality between what you find in the grocery store and what we’re able to offer.”

Peter Nairn, a greenhouse manager with The Neighborhood Harvest, prepares some of the greens in its 30,000 square-foot hydroponic greenhouse off of Turlington Road that will soon be delivered to customers.

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PAGE 16 | SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2022

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