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STOKESDALE - There are no loaves or fish in sight, nothing biblical about this ramshackle tobacco barn down the road from Gideon Grove. Unless, that is, you consider the size of the jumbo sweet potatoes, fresh picked and curing in the shade.

Nearby, in what was once a vacant, unused field, row after row of organic crowder peas are turning ripe in their pods, and 10,000 collard plants trucked in from the east are about to be planted by an army of volunteers.

Meet Randy Braswell. By day, he runs a Triad forklift business, but devotes evenings and weekends to a new way he's found to supply food banks, church pantries and soup kitchens.

He grows it. And grows it cheaply.

"If you look at all the unused, open farmland, and the retired farm equipment that is out there," he says, "it's an awesome way to get fresh produce to people."

Braswell, who grew up on a tobacco farm near Wilson, has two passions suited to this endeavor: One is working the land. The other, restoring old tractors, such as the 1950 International Cub used to plow these fields.

And when he discovered a nationwide food network called the Society of St. Andrew - volunteers who glean the remnants left behind in commercially harvested farm fields - Braswell hatched an idea.

Instead of the gleaners just picking up the leftovers, why not let them harvest the whole crop and distribute it to people in need? At a Methodist conference last spring, Braswell approached Emily Reeve, the Triad coordinator for the St. Andrew gleaning network, and told her about all the food he has been growing for the past five years, mostly on borrowed land around Stokesdale.

"I thought, is this guy for real?" recalls Reeve, who the next day visited Braswell's farm. "He's definitely for real. His cabbages were already in the ground."

This first summer and fall partnership with the gleaners has been fruitful. According to Reeve, Braswell raised 20,800 pounds of cabbage, 6,200 pounds of Irish potatoes, 4,000 pounds of sweet potatoes and 1,500 pounds - and counting - of crowder peas.

It was all distributed by volunteers to churches, families, shut-ins and community centers that sometimes had the food on the table by that night.

Says Marie Stamey, an organizer at Eastside Park Community Center in Greensboro: "Everybody and their uncle got crowder peas. You cook them with some fatback, seasoning, a plate of cabbage, some cornbread. That's a meal. They almost knock out pinto beans. Almost."

In blue-collar neighborhoods, grassroots volunteers like Stamey are growing increasingly concerned by the price of food and transportation. Once a household has paid the utility bills and rent, Stamey observes, there's less left for groceries. The easiest item to cut out is fresh fruit and vegetables - at the expense of good nutrition.

For Braswell, there is a vital connection that grows up between the land, the volunteer harvesters and the families who get the fresh produce - human contact that satisfies a deeper kind of hunger.

"So many times we struggle so much to keep our own heads above water that we don't have time to help somebody else," Braswell says. "It's like, 'You're on your own.' "

From a field of bottom land where he has just bush-hogged the vines back and turned up the sweet potatoes the weekend before, Braswell scoops up a handful of topsoil. Instead of the hard-packed clay familiar to this latitude, the gray soil is loose and rich.

"All the local farmers call this little corner here 'the miracle dirt,' " he says. "I don't care what you plant out there, it will grow."

But that's the thing about a seed: Sometimes you're planting more than you know. A half-hour's drive from Braswell's field of crowder peas, which is dotted with wild purple morning glories that mysteriously sprang up, Marie Stamey has lately noticed something new growing in a flower bed at the neighborhood center in East Greensboro.

Crowder peas.

"I didn't even plant them," she remarks. "I was just sitting out there on the porch shelling peas, and I must have dropped them."

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine. ahearn@news-record.com