Her first book, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War (2013), won the H.L. Mitchell Award of the Southern Historical Association and the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Agricultural History Society. Petty co-directs an oral history project, Breaking New Ground: A History of African American Farm Owners, with Mark Schultz, professor of history at Lewis University. She and Schultz are currently co-writing a book about black farm owners based on more than 300 interviews with black farmers and their descendants.