Virginia Economic Review

In 2001, when cousins Ryan and Travis Croxton took over their family’s 100-year-old oyster bed leases on Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, the Commonwealth’s oyster industry was on life support.

Labor shortages have long been a challenge in agricultural operations, spurring innovative new ways of operating. Today’s farms rely as much on GPS-guided technology and artificial intelligence-driven automation as they do on manual labor.

Agriculture is Virginia's oldest, largest private industry.

Just outside the city of Danville, Virginia, sits a farm unlike any of its neighbors. Tucked into the tree line, it stands 50 feet high, sleek, and solid white, standing out from the long, thin rows of tilled fields that surround it.

Expertise in grapevine grafting and propagation, basic tractor repair, fermentation, and wine racking aren’t exactly skill sets that are widely found among the general population. Yet they are skills upon which the more than 800 wineries, breweries, cideries, and distilleries in Virginia depend.

One Virginia company’s vision of how we grow our food may sound like science fiction. But it’s getting an unusual assist from a unique partnership forged by VEDP’s International Trade Division.