Source: NCDA&CS, 5/12/20

Hunter Barrier has been named superintendent of the Horticultural Crops Research Station at Clinton. The Rowan County native comes to Clinton from the Piedmont Research Station in Salisbury where he has worked since 2015.

Barrier began as a temporary employee and has since moved into roles as a research technician, a research specialist and most recently agriculture research manager for the station’s horticulture research unit. He is also the coordinator for the New and Emerging Crops initiative. He will continue in that role in addition to being superintendent in Clinton.

“Throughout the past five years I have seen firsthand, both as a Research Stations employee and as a farmer, the impact that agricultural research and NCDA&CS’s Research Stations Division has on North Carolina agriculture,” Barrier said. “I am thankful for the opportunity to join and lead a talented and dedicated team at the Horticultural Crops Research Station in Clinton and look forward to continue supporting agricultural research and advancing North Carolina’s number one industry.”

Barrier earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in horticulture science from N.C. State University.

His promotion is effective May 18. For two weeks he’ll overlap with the station’s current superintendent Rodney Mozingo, who retires at the end of May after 25 years in the Research Stations Division.

Mozingo became a research technician at the Cherry Research Farm in Goldsboro in 1995. He advanced to unit manager over crops, and after 12 years at Cherry he was promoted to superintendent of the research station in Clinton.

The Horticultural Crops Research Station at Clinton was established in 1970. The station’s research mainly supports the state’s vegetable industry – aimed at helping growers solve short- and long-term production problems, identify and evaluate alternative production enterprises and maintain sustainability.