Once every month for the past 23 years, local beef farmer Willie Goddard has made a trip from Southern Maryland to Fauquier County, Virginia to have his meat processed.
He spends over $150 on gas and tolls each time he makes the trip, which takes him five hours total, meaning his entire day is “blown away.”
On top of that, Goddard has to schedule his appointments at Fauquier’s Finest Custom Meat Processing two years in advance, before his animals are born.
“There’s such a demand for it,” Goddard said. “There are people there that are coming from almost down to the Carolinas.”
Goddard is not alone in his difficulties with getting his meat processed. There’s over 40 livestock farmers across Southern Maryland who have grown frustrated with how long the meat scheduling process takes. And when the time comes, these farmers embark on hours-long full day trips to processing facilities in Western Maryland, the Eastern Shore, or as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
“If you ask a farmer… ‘What is it that’s your biggest challenge?’ So many of them are going to tell you, it’s time. There is never enough time,” said Mary Wood, the chair of the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission and a farmer at Forrest Hall Farm.
For this very reason, Wood, Goddard and other members of the Southern Maryland farming community envisioned a meat processing plant centrally located in the area, called the Regional Agriculture Center. This center would give local farmers a much more accessible place to process meat.
However, rising costs and other complications would prove to make the project more difficult to complete than the commission had originally expected.
And now, with the project essentially back at square one, farmers like Goddard are going to have to continue to make these long voyages as they wait in frustration for a potential regional meat processing facility someday.
The Early Stages
The Southern Maryland meat industry grew as the tobacco industry declined.
In the early 2000s, then-Gov. Parris Glendening made an agreement with farmers across Southern Maryland to pay state funds to these farmers in exchange for the termination of their tobacco production. This would become known as the tobacco buyout. According to John Hartline, the executive director of the Tri County Council for Southern Maryland, over 800 tobacco farmers took this deal.
Since tobacco was the primary cash crop in the area, many farmers produced nothing else, meaning they needed to pivot their production. The agricultural commission stepped in to help with this process, offering farmers alternatives to tobacco, such as meat production.
A major reason some farmers switched to meat production was the promise of an eventual meat processing facility located in Southern Maryland.
“We told them that we would do this for them if they wanted to select meat production as one of the alternative enterprises on their farm as tobacco went out,” Wood said.
However, with farmers primarily focused on finding initial success with new crops, the project was sidelined for a later date.
That date came in 2018, when talks of constructing a United States Department of Agriculture certified regional meat processing facility resurfaced as demand from both local meat producers and consumers increased.
“Before you know it, the idea of a regional agricultural center could make those things happen and give farmers greater opportunities for profitability and sustainability… it all began to develop again,” Wood said.
The plan for the Regional Agriculture Center was split into two parts – a slaughter facility and a processing center. To complete the slaughterhouse, the commission partnered with the Amish community to establish the West Forty Market in Mechanicville.
In early 2019, St. Mary’s County accepted the council’s $1 million bid to construct the center in Charlotte Hall on pre-owned county land, three miles away from the slaughterhouse. To all parties involved this project seemed like a great idea.
“It was convenient to transport meat there under refrigeration,” Hartline said. “It had the advantage that, since the county owned it, we didn’t actually have to purchase land and neither did St. Mary’s.”
With the direction things were heading, both Hartline and Wood were optimistic about the future of the agriculture center. But that optimism proved to be in vain.
Falling Apart
The development of the Regional Agriculture Center came to a complete halt in March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Chris Kaselemis, the director of economic development for St. Mary’s County, the project had not yet reached the construction phase at this point.
“We don’t start construction projects until we have all funds identified,” Kaselemis said. “And we never got to the point where we had.”
The arrival of COVID meant that the agriculture center was put on the backburner in favor of other more immediate issues. By the time the project was revisited, the costs had risen considerably higher than anyone involved had originally anticipated in just about every category imaginable.
“Everything went up. The cost of engineering and the drawings and the permitting and everything we had to do just kept climbing and climbing,” Wood said. “It was just one issue after another.”
Kaselemis disagreed with Wood. He said “COVID had nothing to do with it.”
According to Kaselemis, the original estimates given were more suited for the construction of a standard office building, rather than a specialized meat processing facility.
“I think what happened was there was an idea that it could be built for X amount of dollars, and then when you start really laying out the plans, something like this is a unique facility,” Kaselemis said.
By 2024, the estimated cost for the project had reached nearly $8 million and it was clear that those rising costs were not going down, Hartline said. As such, the groups working on the project attempted to pursue different routes for the center that would not include construction.
The leading backup option was to rent out an old abandoned Shoppers grocery store in Charlotte Hall, where the meat processing facility would operate. However, this was also shelved after St. Mary’s County commissioners decided there were too many question marks about the building to continue in that direction.
This put the future of the agriculture center in serious doubt.
“It’s not because there weren’t some really good efforts, and it’s not because there’s no need, because there certainly is,” Wood said. “It’s just that we could not get it over the finish line.”
Optimism Remains
On Dec. 10, St. Mary’s County commissioners unanimously agreed to terminate the Regional Agriculture Center.
As for the money, Kaselemis said at the commissioner’s meeting that St. Mary’s County will return $450,000 of the original $1 million grant back to the Tri-County Council.
“We haven’t spent any county money on it,” Kaselemis said. “We have allocated county staff time but no money. So it’s not a loss to our taxpayers.”
In its place, the council plans to use the remaining funds to help the privately-owned Stauffer’s Butcher Barn grow and become a USDA certified meat processing facility.
“The great news here is, we’re going to get a processor in St. Mary’s County,” Commissioner Mike Hewitt (R) said at the meeting.
The original plans for the center may be dead but with the plans for Stauffer’s Butcher Barn, the idea of the center will continue to live on. Despite all the setbacks, Wood is still optimistic that there will be a Regional Agriculture Center someday.
“I know this is a worthy project,” Wood said. “I know that as difficult as it’s been, every minute that we spend on it and every penny that we spend on it is worth it.”
