Filling a Growing Need

"I woke up one morning, and I don't try to put any religious meaning in this, but there was an idea, a total idea in essence," he said. "I considered it to be mandatory orders."

The farm is majestically lighted by sunrises, and on cool spring mornings, the fields are covered in dew. Horses graze at nearby farms, and tractors share the roads with cars.

"We're out here to help and to serve God," said Amber Brady, 19, a student at James Madison University. "Plus, I'm out here having fun with my friends."

Blair spoke to the volunteers about his mission before sending them out to the fields.

"If we don't do something, then we're not going to close this poverty," he said. "Obesity. Diabetes. It's a gap we're not even trying to zero in on."

Volunteers come from church groups, scout troops, high schools, university clubs, fraternities and sororities. Last year, the farm had 2,300 volunteers. Of those, nearly three-fourths were under 18.

Some of the youngest are 5 or 6 years old. Blair said the young volunteers sometimes understand hunger better than the adults.

"They often, almost through sensing it, know kids in their class who are hungry," he said. "An adult wouldn't catch that difference."

The Volunteer Farm provides produce to food banks to supplement their canned goods and nonperishable items, which are often cheaper and easier to collect, store and distribute.

Steven McFarland, spokesman for Chicago-based America's Second Harvest, said that more people are going hungry and that food banks everywhere are experiencing shortages as they try to keep up with increased demand.

Second Harvest, the largest charitable food network in the country, collects and distributes more than 2 billion pounds of food and grocery products to more than 200 food banks and food-rescue organizations in all 50 states, the District and Puerto Rico each year.

The network estimated in its 2006 hunger survey that 66 percent of all the households it serves have annual household incomes at or beneath the poverty line.