Ashburn, GA |
It’s a taste of summer for many around Georgia, with butter beans and field peas now flying off the shelf. And you won’t find them any fresher than at Calhoun Produce in Ashburn, where the journey from field to table can happen in the same day.
“All our peas are hand-picked. Butterbeans we machine pick — our pickers pick four rows at a time. We bring them here to the packing house, grade them, shell them straight off the grading line, and put them in the bag,” said Sheila Rice, owner of Calhoun Produce. “It was growing that morning, and you can be eating it that night. That’s fresh.”
With customers walking through the doors all day long, keeping shelves stocked is a constant job. But Rice says the effort is worth it — because when it comes to peas and butter beans, freshness isn’t just a talking point. It actually changes the taste.
“Oh, definitely. It is perishable — there’s a shelf life on our peas and butterbeans, so once you buy it, it needs to be put up within a few days because it is truly fresh. It was literally growing a few hours before you got it,” Rice said. “We stand behind our product. We offer a clean product, we clean it up, and we want it to be the best. Because it’s ours — it’s coming from our family — so we want it to be the right thing.”
That commitment to quality has been the foundation of this family-run operation for more than forty years, building Calhoun Produce into the go-to source for beans and peas across the state.
“My daddy started growing butter beans back in ’82, and it has just grown through the years. Everybody loves their fresh butterbeans and peas when summertime comes — it’s time to put them up so you can eat them all year long,” Rice said. “We grow about a hundred and thirty acres of butterbeans ourselves, but we have a few more farmers that grow them as well. And we buy local peas from all local growers. There are probably three or four hundred acres of each that come through our packing house.”
For first-time visitors, one of the biggest surprises at Calhoun Produce is just how many varieties are available — from light-broth peas to dark-broth varieties that make for a richer pot.
“You have cream peas, lady fingers, and zippers — they make the light broth. And then the pink eyes, black eyes, and crowders make the dark broth. There are just so many varieties of peas,” Rice said. “When you come in, you can get green butterbeans, pink eyes, lady fingers, creams, zippers. There’s just a big variety that we offer here.”
Despite all the hard work that goes into getting the product from the field to the consumer, Rice says there’s nothing quite like seeing loyal customers come back year after year — some driving from as far away as Atlanta and Florida.
“It makes me so happy. My daddy loves to see all these people come in, and seeing customers that have been coming for twenty and thirty years — it just means a lot,” Rice said. “It makes you feel good. It makes you want to keep doing it.”
For Calhoun Produce, summer isn’t just a season — it’s a tradition. And for thousands of Georgians, it wouldn’t feel complete without a bag of fresh peas and butterbeans from Ashburn.