For a lot of visitors, Virginia Beach becomes a strip of Atlantic Avenue in their heads. There’s the ocean, the hotels, the restaurants, the Boardwalk, and whatever you can reach without moving the car.
Drive south and inland, though, and the city changes surprisingly fast. Storefronts thin out. The horizon gets wider. Farm fields start appearing along roads that feel a long way from an oceanfront resort, even though they’re still very much in Virginia Beach.
This is Pungo, the city’s rural south. It’s worth seeing for more than a basket of strawberries.
A few hours here can change the feel of an entire beach trip. You get a better sense of where local food comes from, why the season matters so much, and just how much of Virginia Beach exists beyond sand and surf.
The farm fields aren’t a novelty
Calling Pungo a “farm-country detour” can undersell it. Agriculture still has a real economic presence in Virginia Beach. The city’s Department of Agriculture puts the annual local economic impact of agribusiness at more than $177 million, with farms producing everything from corn, wheat and soybeans to vegetables and pick-your-own fruit. You’re not visiting a decorative version of farm life built for tourists. You’re driving through a working agricultural community.
That also means the fields aren’t as simple as they look from the road. Growers are constantly dealing with decisions around weather, water, soil, nutrients and crop stress. Across modern farming, interest in biostimulants in agriculture has grown partly because these products are intended to support processes such as nutrient-use efficiency and tolerance to non-living stresses such as heat, drought or salinity. They’re not substitutes for fertilizer or crop protection, and seeing them that way misses the point.
Virginia Beach is an interesting place to think about those pressures because productive farmland sits surprisingly close to a coastal environment. A beautiful week for someone staying at the Oceanfront doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the conditions a crop has experienced over an entire growing season.
Strawberries are a good example. Virginia Tech’s work on strawberry production has included research at its Hampton Roads Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Virginia Beach, looking at varieties and growing systems suited to regional conditions. Commercial strawberry production takes planning well before somebody shows up in May with an empty bucket.
That’s worth remembering when you’re standing in a row looking for the reddest berry you can find. Pick-your-own farming makes agriculture feel wonderfully simple for an afternoon. For the farmer, it’s the visible end of months of work.
Go when something is actually in season
The easiest Pungo mistake is treating it like an attraction with fixed operating hours.
It isn’t.
You’re planning around living crops, and crops don’t care about your Saturday itinerary. A farm can have excellent picking one morning and close a field later because customers cleaned out the ripe fruit. Rain can change conditions. Heat can speed things up. A crop that looked almost ready a few days ago may still need time.
Spring is strongly associated with strawberries. The area’s berry history runs deep, and the official Virginia Beach tourism site highlights Pungo’s family farms as the center of much of the city’s pick-your-own activity. But the countryside doesn’t become irrelevant when strawberry season ends. Depending on the farm and the month, summer and fall can bring blueberries, blackberries, peaches, vegetables, apples, pumpkins and other crops.
That makes checking the farm itself more important than checking a generic “best time to visit Virginia Beach” calendar.
If you have your heart set on picking, look at the farm’s website or social feed the morning you plan to go. Pay attention to whether it says you-pick, pre-picked, or both. Those details matter, especially if you’re traveling with children who have been promised an hour in the field rather than five minutes at a produce stand.
The old rhythm of the Pungo Strawberry Festival also shows how closely the area’s identity is tied to the crop. Events can change from year to year, so they’re best treated as something to verify rather than build a trip around months in advance.
There’s another advantage to following the season instead of forcing a particular activity: you notice more. A roadside stand stacked with sweet corn in summer or pumpkins in October tells you what’s happening locally right now. That’s more interesting than arriving with a checklist created six months earlier.
Don’t turn Pungo into a five-stop race
A day in Pungo can go wrong in a very modern way: too much planning.
You find three farms, a market, breakfast, a museum, a park and a scenic route online. Suddenly the “slow countryside day” has a departure time for every parking lot.
Pick one main thing.
If it’s strawberry season, make the farm the anchor. Arrive earlier in the day, especially when the forecast is warm. Bring shoes you don’t mind getting dusty or muddy and something to protect yourself from the sun. If the farm sells cold drinks, baked goods or pre-picked produce, give yourself enough time to look around instead of treating checkout like the end of the errand.
If picking isn’t available, Pungo still works as a drive-and-stop day. The broader district covers thousands of acres of rural landscape, and Visit Virginia Beach’s Pungo guide points visitors toward farms, food, outdoor stops and other attractions spread through the area. This isn’t a walkable neighborhood where you park once and wander between businesses. Having a car, and leaving some slack in the schedule, makes the experience much better.
There’s also no need to manufacture an entire “farm-to-table experience” out of it. Buy berries because they look good. Stop for lunch because you’re hungry. Pull over at a farm stand because the tomatoes caught your eye.
That loose approach suits the area.
For visitors staying closer to the resort district, the Virginia Beach Farmers Market can also work as an easier introduction to the region’s local food. It’s useful when your schedule doesn’t line up with field conditions, or when somebody in the family loves fresh produce but has absolutely no desire to spend an hour crouching between strawberry rows.
The best Pungo day may also include the beach
Pungo doesn’t have to compete with the reason you came to Virginia Beach.
One of the smartest ways to use it is to break up a beach-heavy vacation. After two or three days of sand, seafood dinners and the same view down Atlantic Avenue, an inland morning feels different enough to reset the trip.
It also pairs well with the quieter southern end of Virginia Beach. Pungo sits close enough to Sandbridge that you can spend part of the day around farms and country roads, then finish near the water. The scenery changes quickly, which is part of what makes southern Virginia Beach easy to underestimate.
Families may find this particularly useful. Children who are getting restless with another full beach day usually understand the appeal of finding the biggest strawberry, seeing farm animals, walking through a pumpkin patch or choosing something they can eat later. Adults get something out of it too. A bag of fruit bought where it was grown is a better vacation souvenir than most things with “Virginia Beach” printed across the front.
Just don’t assume rural means empty. Roads can get busy during popular picking weekends and special events. Some farms have limited parking, and the pace can change dramatically when everyone arrives on the first beautiful Saturday of the season.
If you have flexibility, a weekday morning is hard to beat.
There’s one other reason to make room for Pungo. Places built around tourism can sometimes make a destination feel separate from normal life. You sleep in a hotel, eat in visitor-heavy areas and move between attractions designed to accommodate people who leave a few days later.
Pungo interrupts that bubble. The fields aren’t there because you came on vacation. The farm trucks are going somewhere. Somebody is planting, irrigating, harvesting or preparing for the next crop whether you stop or keep driving.
That gives the place some weight.
Wrap-up takeaway
You can spend a whole Virginia Beach trip near the water and still miss a big part of the place. Pungo is a good reminder of that. A morning out there might be as simple as picking whatever’s in season, buying more produce than you planned to, and taking the long way back. Some days the fields will be busy, some days they won’t, and that’s part of the appeal. Check what’s open before you leave, then give yourself enough time not to rush it.
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