For six weeks every summer, packaging lines at Chester Barnhill’s Sweet Berry Farms are a blur of blueberries.
Barnhill and Joey Benton, his plant manager, oversee an annual harvest that pushes 240,000 pints of blueberries through six packaging lines each day. The work lasts until Benton’s crew packs the last of the 6 million pounds of blueberries that Barnhill’s Ivanhoe, NC, fields yield each season.