Farm Production – Promise Land Pastures

Food TEAM

Reuben Smith — Mon, 25 May 2026 23:51:31 +0000

Powhatan Owen: Our Camp Cook Extraordinaire!

Powhatan Owen is a camp cook extraordinaire!

As the men’s firewood fellowship events grew into a regular occurrence that always included a hearty meal, Powhatan began stepping up more and more as a key member of our food prep volunteer team. It soon became clear that this was his true gift and passion. God has blessed Pow with a special talent for preparing delicious, hearty meals for large groups of hardworking, hungry people.

As a result, we have joyfully entrusted him with increasing leadership over our food service. At recent events, Pow has prepared all the food from his “man cave” and delivered it fresh to the site when the chow bell rings — much to everyone’s delight!

Powhatan and his wife Carol have also taken on another important role. They volunteer to wash, pack, and deliver eggs for our donations to The Storehouse food pantry. They sometimes handle as many as 60 dozen eggs at a time! In addition, they are official volunteers at the pantry, holding a key to the warehouse and helping place the eggs directly into the walk-in cooler.

Powhatan’s role as our Food Team Leader continues to grow in importance. As we prepare for larger-scale stew events this fall — using the farm’s own meats and vegetables — his excellent food service skills will be invaluable.

In a time when food prices continue to rise, our goal is to expand our teams that produce, prepare, and provide food to meet the growing needs around us.

Thank you, Pow, for your faithful and flavorful service!

Training Tuesdays!

Reuben Smith — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:07:04 +0000

For several months now, a group of young people from Lux Church in Richmond have been coming out once a week on Tuesday mornings for mentoring and training in practical skills while volunteering on the farm.

The goal of this work is to equip these young people with confidence-building life skills and to deepen their faith in the Lord in a way that prepares them for the calling He has on their lives.

These young people are eager to learn new things. Recently, they expressed an earnest desire to learn how to butcher chickens! So we put together a chicken slaughter workshop using some of the roosters we had been raising for this purpose. These brave teens and their youth leader helped us slaughter, scald, pluck, and eviscerate a dozen birds for meat. The kids had a ball, we were able to reduce the rooster population, and we filled the freezer with meat.

As we work together on these days, we talk about what we’ve been discovering in the Bible or principles of God’s Kingdom. These young people demonstrate rare maturity and character, and we believe they are going to be leaders with us as we see a move of God among young people in the near future.

God story that started 30+years ago

Reuben Smith — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 18:12:41 +0000

When Debra and I were in the youth group at Mechanicsville Christian Center in the mid-80s, long before we were married, our youth pastor, Carter Goolsby, took the teens on a cross-country adventure to a youth rally called Youth America in Oklahoma. It was a 30-hour charter bus ride that our church co-chartered with the youth group from Lighthouse Christian Center, another area church affiliated with ours. The experience left an indelible impression on our lives and the lives of all the other students and youth leaders on the bus.

Recently, a young person reached out to me about our programs here at Promise Land Pastures. She had seen our website and was intrigued. She shared that she had always had a passion for farming since she was little. She also shared that she was a Christian whose dad was a pastor of a local church in Henrico, and our concept of a farm that was also a Christian mission outreach excited her. She asked if she and her grandmother could visit the farm and volunteer with us.

We set up the visit, and this girl, her grandmother, and her sister spent a few hours with us. As we introduced ourselves and shared our stories, it turned out that the girl’s grandmother was one of the youth leaders from Lighthouse Christian Center who had been on that 30-hour bus ride with us back in the 80s! We couldn’t believe it. She knew our pastor well, and we had many other significant ministry connections. Her son had become a pastor of a church plant in Henrico County, and It was his daughter, Trinity, who had found our website and reached out to us. It became clear to us that this was more than a coincidence—it was a divine appointment. We believe God led Trinity to reach out to us for a future partnership between our two ministries, and for us to help her fulfill her God given destiny as well.

Trinity, her sister, and her grandmother helped Debra and me harvest sweet potatoes from our community garden, which we share with the Chickahominy Tribe. The harvest was very successful! We had a whole tractor loader full of perfect sweet potatoes that we will use as part of the farm’s food production in creative ways to serve and inspire people in the community.

Wesley Adkins from the tribal garden was also there working, and we were able to get to know one another. God is weaving a tapestry of churches, cultures, and community!

Broody Hens–Innovative Egg Ministry!

Reuben Smith — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:00:06 +0000

Our ministry’s flocks of egg-laying Australorp chickens are a vital part of our farm’s community outreach programs. Through the generous, ongoing support of Mechanicsville Christian Center, we are able to donate nearly 18,000 eggs each year to shut-ins, food-insecure individuals, and people with disabilities in our community. We provide 30 dozen eggs every week during the laying season (March–November). Our eggs are distributed by volunteer drivers who make home deliveries in partnership with our affiliate food pantry, Promise Land Storehouse. They deliver to 70 households across seven distribution routes. During the spring flush months (March–May), when our egg production is at its peak, we double our egg donations to 60 dozen per week and provide an additional 30 dozen per week to the Charles City Food Pantry, which offers weekly free shopping days for the community.

To keep these flocks laying at optimal levels, we must continuously refresh the laying flock with new chickens. We can either purchase new chicks each year or brood our own using fertilized eggs from our flock. Committed to sustainability and innovation, we have worked diligently to develop a system that uses a small, separate flock of Silkie chickens to brood and raise new chicks for our egg project. Silkies have incredible mothering instincts and will incubate the fertilized eggs from our Australorp layers as if they were their own. After 21 days, these devoted little mothers will have a brood of black Australorp chicks to nurture until they are ready to join the main flock.

This short video explains the system. This year, we seem to have finally perfected the brooding process by utilizing an innovative broody chamber that we designed and built with the help of our student interns. So far, we are seeing a steady stream of new chicks and faithful Silkie mothers to care for them, and the system is working well! It’s so much fun! We hope to hold workshops in the future to teach other family farms how to build these broody chambers and establish their own brooding systems for their flocks.

Chickahominy Tribe Joins PLP to Establish Community Garden

Reuben Smith — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 15:35:15 +0000

The Chickahominy Indian Tribe plays a vital role in Charles City County. As a deeply Christian community, they embody strong family bonds and a commitment to caring for one another and their neighbors. From the outset of our presence here, we’ve recognized God’s call to honor and partner with the Chickahominy people.

Troy Adkins has been a steadfast ally and friend since our beginning. Troy is a tribe member, and he sits on the Tribe’s governing council. He recently agreed to join our board of directors with Promise Land as well! We are so excited to have this influential brother and representative of the Chickahominy serving on our own leadership team. Troy reached out to us about collaboration on the tribe’s community garden efforts. The Tribe’s plans for community gardens align perfectly with our long-held vision of creating ministry gardens through teamwork with local residents on our property.

The tribe’s goal is to cultivate healthy, organic produce—especially for the elderly and those in need—while promoting unity among tribal members and neighbors. We enthusiastically embraced this opportunity to host some of the gardens here.

Consequently, Dana Adkins, who oversees the tribe’s agricultural initiatives, worked alongside us and two other tribal staff to launch the project. Using their tractor and tiller, they prepared two adjacent 50-by-50-foot plots here on the farm: one for the tribe and one for us.

Several weeks in, both gardens are thriving. We will be working to encourage more and more volunteer involvement and expansion of the efforts. We’re currently growing heirloom Virginia corn varieties for meal grain and decorative crafts at powwows. This corn is so significant! The name, “Chickahominy” means, “the people of the coarse ground corn.” This tribe was known for their crops of corn–it is their very identity as native Virginians. They are one of the first contact tribes with the English settlers, and their corn was a special new food to these first colonies. In fact, it was the Chickahominy’s corn that saved Jamestown from starvation during that first perilous winter the settlers faced.

Along with the corn, we are also growing butternut squash, sweet potatoes, beans, tomatoes, watermelon, zucchini, and more. Above all, we’re fostering joy, unity, and love as we work side by side.

Swarms!! April Bees Post

Reuben Smith — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 07:19:03 +0000

Our Beekeeping program has been growing fast. Mentor beekeeper Scott Maclelland, has been training PLP staff and students in lots of Beekeeping skills. Identifying brood patterns and evidence of the queen and her laying strength. Understanding the timing of beekeeping tasks as they relate to the seasons. The list goes on and on. We have been blessed with FOUR new wild swarms that we were able to capture. This Brings us up to 6 active hives in our apiary. Christian Stewart has been one of the students learning beekeeping, and he was working along with Reuben as they caught a massive swarm of perhaps 60,000 bees by hand!

When a swarm appears, you have to act fast! Here Mentor Reuben Smith and Christian Stewart prepare to capture another swarm. All of the frames and boxes and other tools have to be prepared ahead of time and standing by for the moment a swarm is spotted. A swarm is a bee colony’s way of reproducing itself. The hive decides it needs to split itself in two. They “make” another queen by feeding royal jelly to a new egg. Once the new queen emerges, the old queen takes a large group of the bees and leaves to find another home. if you can capture that cluster of bees while they are relocating, you have just added another hive to your apiary!

New Kids On The Block!!

Reuben Smith — Fri, 27 Sep 2019 16:35:05 +0000

Promise Land Pastures is home to a growing herd of Nigerian Dwarf dairy goats. Our girls are registered with the American Goat Society or AGS. We have been having a number of kids born on the farm recently. There isn’t much that’s cuter than a baby goat! here are a few of the new additions…