One of the Southeast’s largest farms, based in Nash County and owned by the family of Republican state Sen. Lisa Stone Barnes, has been put into receivership after defaulting on more than $40 million in loans, WRAL reported last week.
Barnes Family Farms comprises over 20,000 acres of farmland around Rocky Mount and Wilson and is also one of the nation’s biggest growers of sweet potatoes.
The lender, Rabo Agrifinance, is a lending arm of Netherlands-based RaboBank, which provided multiple loans to Barnes Family Farms and several related businesses starting in 2014, court and property records show. The loans included $25 million for crops, plus millions of dollars more used to purchase land and farming equipment. Rabo Agrifinance filed a lawsuit in 2024 claiming that they hadn’t received any repayment from the Barnes family in the 10 years since issuing the loans. WRAL reported that court records show farming land in Nash, Edgecombe and Wilson counties are listed as collateral for the loans.
A legal filing submitted last week by a bankruptcy attorney representing Barnes, her husband Johnny and the farm claims that the company’s efforts to recoup their money are “offensive to public policy” because they shouldn’t have named Lisa Stone Barnes in their lawsuit — despite her claims that she works for and manages the farm — and are trying “to use Lisa Barnes’ public and political capital as intangible collateral to [guarantee] repayment of her husband’s business obligations.”
Much of the Barnes companies’ land, equipment and crops are now in the hands of a court-ordered receiver who is allowed to run the business, or sell everything, in order to make as much money back for the bank as possible.
In a November court order, Nash County Superior Court Judge Timothy Wilson wrote that revenues from the business “are either not being collected or are not being paid to [Rabo Agrifinance] and are thus being lost, wasted, transferred, concealed or impaired.”
The farm has previously been the subject of media coverage and state investigations. Last year, the farm was hit with massive fines — nearly $190,000 in penalties from the NC Department of Labor (NCDOL) — after an investigation found Barnes Farming committed multiple violations that played a role in the heat-related death of a migrant worker from Mexico in 2023. This was not the first time the farm had been fined for NCDOL violations.
A husband and father of two, José Arturo Gónzalez Mendoza, 29, of Guanajuato, had been working on the Spring Hope farm for less than two weeks when he died in the field on Sept. 5, 2023. The NC Department of Labor cited Barnes Farming with a “willful serious violation” and two other “serious” violations, which resulted in a $187,509 fine for the company — the maximum penalty allowed.
The NCDOL’s investigation showed that it took 50 minutes for anyone to call 911 and the farm was also cited for only allowing workers one five-minute break while harvesting crops, failing to provide any shaded or cool areas, and not providing enough water or any way to drink the water while workers were in the fields.
Lisa and Johnny Barnes are now trying to limit how much of their property and businesses the bank can access. Both Barneses are named individually as defendants in the lawsuit. In addition, six companies they control as part of their farming business are part of the suit.
