By RICHARD DAVIS
Lee Swinson has always been a farmer. But farmers are businesspeople too, and it doesn’t take long to recognize Swinson is a young man with a natural talent for business.
For the past couple of years Swinson has been building his Golden Grove Candy Co. and formulating, packaging, manufacturing and promoting his Carolina Crisp candy bar. He started out with a few stores carrying the bar in just a few counties. Now he has buyers in three states and soon in two European countries.
"Farmers have people on one end of the spectrum telling them what they have to pay for their input costs. On the other end of the spectrum, they havepeople telling them what they will get paid for their product. I wanted more control of my situation myself,” Swinson says. “When I grow peanuts, I want to capture more of the profi t in the production myself. I can do that with the candy bar.”
Swinson farms near Warsaw, N.C., on the family farm with his father, Vic, and grandfather Nick. He’s 27 now but started driving the tobacco cropper through the fi eld when he was 5 or 6 years old. Demonstrating his business acumen at an early age, he rented his fi rst farm on his own when he was 12 and farmed it with his dad’s equipment.
Launching a new product takes help
IN October of 2007, Lee Swinson made a decision to use the peanuts he was producing on his Warsaw, N.C., area farm to make and market a new candy bar, the Carolina Crisp. He’s made great progress, but he says he’s made some mistakes and spent more money than perhaps he had to. The fact is, learning the ropes in any new business is a sometimes painful process.
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(Re-posted from www.CarolinaVirginiaFarmer.com July 2009)
