2 Tools That Help Howell Farming Focus on Its Vegetables

Third-generation farmer Frank Howell, his son Garrett, and son-in-law Danny Beasley Jr. grow sweet potatoes and watermelon from their operation, Howell Farming Co., in Goldsboro, NC, about an hour southeast of Raleigh.

Sweet potatoes are native to North Carolina and grown mostly in the coastal plain region. No other state grows more of the vegetable. The ‘Covington’ sweet potato, which accounts for 90% of the sweet potatoes planted in North Carolina, is an orange-fleshed, smooth skinned, rose-colored, table-stock sweet potato developed by North Carolina State University (NCSU).

North Carolina is also the eighth-largest watermelon state. Howell Farming Co. specializes in growing seedless varieties.

With those two crops so prevalent at their operation, the Howells have solved the problem of limited crop rotation options by coordinating with neighboring farms. “We get together and see what they need and tell them what we need. We’ve got good relationships,” Frank Howell said in American Vegetable Grower’s March 2024 cover story. “Say a certain field has watermelons this season. The next year it may get sweet potatoes, the next year it may get soybean or cotton.”

The Howells enjoy solid relationships with their equipment as well. Here, Garrett Howell singles out two of his favorite machines:

Seed Master 250-28 (Strickland Bros. Enterprises)

This machine allows accurate and gentle placement of sweet potato seed in uniform manner, down to 28- to 36-inch bed widths. It provides growers with the ability to bed thousands of bushels per day with only two operators. The 250-bushel capacity hopper empties in about 3 minutes. The fully adjustable conveyor speed allows correct seed placement. Extra heavy-duty floating tandem axles will travel smoothly over all field conditions. Says Howell: “We use our seed wagons to lay out our sweet potato seed in rows for our plant beds. We come behind it and cover up the rows of seed with dirt and then plastic.”
StricklandBros.com

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Custom-Designed Tank Mounts (Strickland Bros. Enterprises)

“This is our custom-fabricated row middle sprayer for our watermelon fields,” Howell says. “We use to apply herbicide in-between the rows to keep clean.”

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Click here to see more installments of American Vegetable Grower’s “Kick the Tires” series.