For each quarter of the year, the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services recognizes a group of employees with an award for teamwork. The “Excellence in Team Accomplishment Award” goes to employees who have shown service-oriented teamwork as they worked together on projects that further efficiency, demonstrate good stewardship of taxpayer dollars and/or benefit the citizens of North Carolina.
Each team is recognized as part of the Department’s regular meeting of division directors. Although a new team is selected every three months, the presentations of awards can occasionally fall behind because of scheduling conflicts. The following is a look at all four teams recognized last year.
Digital Commons Web Management Team
The Digital Commons website management team took on the ambitious goal of completely overhauling the department’s website. The change involved moving all of the content at ncagr.gov and all the web pages linked within it from an old platform to the new Digital Commons platform.
The update has also aimed to make the site more user friendly and more accessible to those with physical disabilities or other restrictions.
In addition to the IT employees of the department who were involved, each division of the department designated a web manager to oversee the work of transitioning content to the new platform. That means 27 employees were honored with the Excellence in Team Accomplishment award. They were:
| Herman Honeycutt, Project leader | Kathy Turner, Legal Affairs |
| Adam Kracht, IT specialist | Shirley Nicholson, Marketing |
| Stuart Medlin, IT assistant | Kenyatta Daniel, Meat & Poultry Inspection |
| Susan Marcks, Ag Finance Authority | Christie Adams, N.C. Forest Service |
| Josh Shepherd, Troxler Ag Sciences Center | Sarah Ray, N.C. State Fair |
| Sherry Teachey, Ag Statistics | Amanda Hubbard, Plant Industry |
| Sandra Carpenter Aiello, Agronomic Services | Nasrin Sumee, Property & Construction |
| Andy McKinney, Budget & Finance | Heather Overton, Public Affairs |
| Christian Vose, Emergency Programs | Anthony Thomas, Research Stations |
| Corey Hoilman, Farmland Preservation | Julie Henshaw, Soil & Water Conservation |
| Shannon Redd, Food & Drug Protection | Stephen Benjamin, Standards |
| Sanjay Patel, Food Distribution | Don Daley, Structural Pest Control & Pesticides |
| Amy Summerlin, Human Resources | David Hill, Veterinary |
| Derek Allred, Internal audit |
The team of employees had weekly meetings from May through December of 2023, and each person had to manage moving all of his or her division’s content from the old website platform to the new platform. That included updating and moving links, and some divisions had more than a thousand links to move to the new platform.
There were training classes that took five hours spread across two days and separate meetings to hammer out guidelines for consistency across the website.
“As you probably know, this was a big time commitment, and normal jobs had to continue too,” said Commissioner Steve Troxler during the award presentation. “Regulatory activities and large events like the State Fair demand attention, but these employees also carved out time to keep this project rolling.
‘All along, this truly was a team effort, as everyone shared ideas and helped each other. Whether answers came from the IT staff or the other members of the team, answers were always quick, and there was a cooperative spirit of working together for the greater good.”
Ultimately, the people of North Carolina now benefit from an updated website that lays out information in a logical way on webpages that can be more quickly and easily be updated without delays.
“This group is worthy of this award because of how they successfully tackled this huge project as a team and how it will pay off for the people we serve,” Troxler said.
Emergency Programs – Information Support Services
The Information Support Services team in the Emergency Programs Division completed two big projects to help the Department of Agriculture with operations and decision making during disaster responses. That work earned the following employees the Excellence in Team Accomplishment award:
| Daniel Pennell, Applications Analyst | Nicole Atalla, GIS Programmer |
| Robert Hilton, GIS Programmer | Hannah Kyung, GIS Analyst |
Together, they tackled the process of getting the ASAP portal and the ARROW application up and running. Both of those programs consolidate information that is normally widely distributed, and each one helps the department in a different way.
ASAP stands for Agriculture Situational Awareness Portal. It was developed to provide information about emergency situations to top levels of leadership and response partners within the department.
The portal provides direct access to daily briefings, weather updates, incident action plans, links to executive orders and useful tools and maps that could help the entire department be more informed and make better decisions during an emergency event.
“The team worked extra hard and sped up their efforts to get ASAP ready before Hurricane Idalia hit the Gulf Coast last August,” said Chief Deputy Commissioner David Smith who presented the award in Troxler’s absence. “The project was really just in its early stages then, but the team jumped into overdrive to be sure ASAP was available in time. They worked longer hours and put other work aside. As a result, executive staff was able to use it to post and access documents in real time before, during and after Idalia.”
ARROW stands for Agriculture Regional Response and Organizational Workgroups. It is a web mapping application used as a quick tool to spatially represent important emergency response locations for quick reference during an agriculture emergency. It provides a geographic representation of NCDA&CS divisional regions, contact information, N.C. Emergency Management, response zones, etc. The design helps decision makers absorb information at once and see what resources are in a given region.
“Both projects required these employees to learn new things and troubleshoot together, but they overcame any obstacles by working as a team,” Smith said. “Their success means we and our emergency response partners can reduce the number of back-and-forth emails, phone calls and information seeking requests that have to go out. By consolidating all the information in one place, users are able to look up information on their own and get it on-demand.”
Thanks to the team’s work, each division of the department has benefitted from better emergency communications. That ultimately helps the department serve the citizens of North Carolina – particularly in the agricultural community – during emergencies.
Pesticide Disposal Assistance Program
In July of 2024, the Pesticide Disposal Assistance Program hit a major milestone and collected its five-millionth pound of pesticides. Since the program began in 1980, continuous effort over 44 years brought the program to that mark.
Every year, the program holds dozens of events where North Carolina farmers or any other residents can bring their unwanted, banned or outdated pesticides for proper disposal at no cost to them.
“To give you a sense of how busy they’ve been, think about the fact that it took about 39 years to hit the four million mark in 2019. Then, they collected another million pounds in just the past five years,” Troxler said. “To make those collection events happen, they coordinated with county extension agents, other county leaders and a hazardous waste contractor to conduct pesticide collections across the state.”
The team helped counties identify local needs and scheduled and hosted regular collections and special collection events. They even provided technical expertise for local waste programs. They also have taken calls when there’s an unexpected drop-off at local garbage facility or when a location needed special attention to remove pesticides.
The amount of pesticides disposed of annually through the program has increased nearly 500% since it started. That includes about a 40% increase in disposal since the last budget increase 20 years ago. So they have found ways to meet an increasing need even without an increase in funding or resources.
For example, they choose to be onsite for most events so there’s no need to pay a contractor for that same service. Or they’ve worked with counties to piggy-back on a county collection event or to partner on year-round drop-off options.
“Their work has prevented potential harm to human health or the environment from improper disposal, leaks, spills or illegal dumping,” Troxler said. “Thanks to them, the program continues to make our state healthier and safer by reducing the amount of pesticides that, without this program, could potentially reach our drinking water, groundwater, streams, rivers, land and air across the state.”
In recent years, the program has operated with three very dedicated employees in the Structural Pest Control and Pesticides Division. Their names and positions follow:
- Derrick Bell, pesticide disposal specialist and program manager
- Jeremy Maciejewski, pesticide disposal specialist
- Ken Crabtree, pesticide disposal specialist
Unfortunately, Ken passed away in late September before he could be part of receiving the award. His wife Darlene was at the award presentation on his behalf.
“Derrick, Jeremy and Ken worked seamlessly together, and thanks to them, other state programs and various others involved in disposal programs within the state, look to us as a resource,” Troxler said.
Bell mentioned that there were others over the years that helped the program reach the milestone. In particular, he asked to recognize former program director Royce Batts for his years of service and his contributions to the program.
Technical Training Team of the Food Program
The technical training team of the Food Program is made up of two women often referred to as a dynamic duo. Martha Osborne and Je’Velle Leavens earned the Excellence in Team Accomplishment Award thanks to a new training system they started developing in 2020, when inspection activities were halted.
That work continues to show results today with every new food inspector hired for the Food Program in the Food and Drug Protection Division.
“Going back to March of 2020, these trainers didn’t see a setback. Instead, they saw an opportunity to provide food inspectors needed training on the latest food processing methods and regulatory science,” Troxler said. “While some training was previously available, it came in the field or during FDA training events, and it wasn’t everything it could be. So these ladies took their 37 years of combined experience and created a training system that would serve as the foundation for all newly hired inspectors.”
During the pandemic, they created and trained employees on various subjects that amounted to more than 130 continuing education hours. Examples of their creations include food or industry specific overviews, virtual retail inspection guides, checklists to use during inspections and critical thinking exercises for applying regulations. Many of the presentations and resources they created are still used with new hires.
“From time the new training began to this year, they have ushered nine new food inspectors into the program – all with excellent results using their training tools,” Troxler said. “The new training has also helped increase camaraderie because it officially paired established inspectors with trainees to help them learn.”
The training has also helped Osborne and Leavens establish an excellent rapport with field inspectors, old and new. The inspectors feel comfortable turning to the trainers with questions, and the trainers always consider how changes and requirements will affect the field staff.
The training they created has also allowed the department to be part of multiple federal cooperative programs, which frees up state resources, according to Amy Zimmerman, the regulatory programs coordinator who nominated the duo for the award. Audit scores and program evaluations from the FDA have become better each year, and that good standing allows the division to take advantage of further training opportunities and grant resources from FDA.
“We can all be grateful for the work of these trainers because North Carolina has safe food thanks to the well-trained, intelligent and careful inspectors,” Troxler said. “The trainers are the ones who set the foundation for each one of them. Now their institutional knowledge is organized and recorded for use well into the future.”