It's Wednesday morning and a crew of volunteers, eyes to the ground, follows a creeping tractor. Other eyes scan the skies, hoping not to see the start of extensive rain forecast for the next several days.
This is the first day of sweet potato planting season for the Cleveland County Potato Project.
What do 24,000 sweet potato slips look like? Twenty cardboard cartons, each smaller than a laundry basket, bursting with a green carpet of spinach-like leaves.
Each slip must be individually handled, placed in a clamp, doused with water and mechanically inserted into row after row in a 3-acre field off Botts Road north of Shelby.
The heads-down group watches, steps, then slides a shoe through the soil to shore up the new plants.
The rains hold off and by the end of the workday, 10,500 leafy green slips are ready to take root, possibly a project record for one day's planting, according to CCPP co-founder Doug Sharp.
One more day and all 24,000 are in the ground, with room for 3,000 more coming next week.
Sharp and fellow founder Bill Horn, marking the tenth year for this almost-all-volunteer project, are ecstatic about a new $2,000 grant recently announced by Dick Baker, executive director of the HealthCare Foundation of Cleveland County.
HFCC's mission: "To be a catalyst for promoting wellness and improving health in Cleveland County."
"We seek to make transformative grants that address the social determinants of health and well-being that affect the citizens of Cleveland County," Baker said.
"In particular, we like to support innovative programs and initiatives from smaller non-profit organizations that directly impact specific needs, such as hunger and access to healthy foods, among others.
"The Cleveland County Potato Project has a long history of success, solely through the efforts of volunteers. We are hopeful this community health grant will enable them to serve more people in need in the coming year."
CCPP's first money came from the N.C. State Baptist Convention, a gift prompted by the work of the Rev. Charles Reed, retired missions director of the Greater Cleveland County Baptist Association.
"And we get individual donations too," Sharp said, "and appreciate every one of them. We always need money."

CLEVELAND COUNTY POTATO PROJECT
10 years
1,000+ volunteers
850,000+ pounds of white and sweet potatoes
$450,000 street value
501(c)3 corporation
Contact: https://www.ccpotatoproject.com/
Doug Sharp: 704-472-5128
Facebook: Cleveland County Potato Project

Photo: Slow and steady gets the job done, in this case planting more than 10,000 little green leaflets called sweet potato slips. Volunteer members of Junior Civitans helped a couple of adult workers in the painstaking process Wednesday as the Cleveland County Potato Project continued its tenth anniversary year.

Submitted by Cassie E. Herndon