page_title: Suffolk, Virginia
section_title: Economy
hierarchical_section_title: Suffolk, Virginia / Economy
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo by William J. Grimes in Suffolk at the Seaboard Passenger Station. This image is watermarked to give credit to the photographer!
context_page_description: Suffolk is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As of the 2010 census, the population was 84,585. It is the largest city in Virginia by boundary land area as well as the 14th largest in the country.
  Suffolk is located in the Hampton Roads metropolitan area. This also includes the independent cities of Chesapeake, Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach, and smaller cities, counties, and towns of Hampton Roads. With miles of waterfront property on the Nansemond and James rivers, present-day Suffolk was formed in 1974 after consolidating with Nansemond County and the towns of Holland and Whaleyville. The current mayor is Linda T. Johnson.
context_section_description: In modern times, Suffolk remains a major peanut processing center and railroad and highway transportation hub. It hosts a diverse combination of industrial, manufacturing, distribution, retail, and hospitality businesses, as well as active farming.
  In 2002, the new Louise Obici Memorial Hospital was completed and dedicated. It was acquired in 2005 by the Sentara Health System. Planters' Peanuts has been a major employer, now owned by Kraft Foods. Each fall since 1977, the City of Suffolk hosts Suffolk Festivals Incorporated's annual Peanut Fest.
  Other large employers in the City of Suffolk include Unilever, Lipton Tea, Wal-Mart, Target, QVC, and two major modeling and simulation companies, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Lockheed Martin built its "Center for Innovation" around a lighthouse in Suffolk, for which the campus is called 'The Lighthouse'. Raytheon won a DoD contract to manufacture 'Miniature Air-Launched Decoy Jammers'(MALD-J), which it has been producing with Cobham Composite Products: 202 vehicles for a price of  $81 million .
  The U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) facility, near the intersection of US 17 and Interstate 664, has resulted in a growth in defense contracting and high tech jobs since 1999. Through the following decade, JFCOM employed a growing number of defense contractors until it reached over 3,000. By September 2010, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recommended to decommission JFCOM, as a matter of reallocating and rebalancing the U.S. Department of Defense budget, to better address changing needs and fiscal demands.
  The announcement led to speculation about the effects the loss of JFCOM would have on the Hampton Roads economy in general and (more specifically), on the future of related businesses located in the Harborview section of Suffolk. In August 2011 JFCOM was disestablished. But many critical JFCOM functions, such as joint training, joint exercises, and joint development were retained in the buildings vacated by JFCOM, under the auspices of the Joint Staff J7 Directorate, referred to as either "Pentagon South" or "Joint and Coalition Warfighting".
  By summer 2013, city officials expected the Naval Network Warfare Command, NNWC Global Network Operations Center Detachment, Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command and Navy Cyber Forces to occupy buildings vacated by JFCOM. These commands have been considered a boon to north Suffolk, bringing an estimated 1,000 additional employees, counting military, civilians and contractors, with an estimated annual payroll of $88.9 million. The buildup in these defense functions resulted in Suffolk's median income increasing markedly in this period.
caption: A RailBox boxcar exporting peanuts.
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