County to buy grain elevator
90 days to close deal on facility for local farmers
Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman announced Tuesday that the county intends to buy a grain elevator in Lothian from Perdue Farms for $1.25 million.
Perdue, a poultry farming company headquartered in Salisbury, announced in January 2021 it planned to close the elevator, which stockpiles and retrieves harvested grain. Perdue’s decision was due to a significant reduction in both farmland and total harvested grain acres over the last 20 years, said Perdue CEO Randy Day.
Local farmers raised concerns to Pittman about the effect the closure would have on their business. A month after Perdue announced it would be closing the elevator by the end of March 2021, Pittman was able to convince the company to reverse course and keep the facility open for at least two more years to find an alternative solution.
The facility serves more than 100 farmers and stores about 17% of the grain harvested in Southern Maryland, according to Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission Director Shelby Watson-Hampton. It can store up to one million bushels of grain with a rough market value of about $8.5 million annually, she said.
“In a very short timeframe, we concluded that this facility could and should support local farms for many decades into the future,” Pittman said in a statement.
The county will conduct an environmental assessment of the facility and seek approval for the purchase from the County Council. The county has 90 days to secure the deal.
The state’s proposed fiscal 2024 budget includes funding to reimburse the county for the purchase, according to a county news release.
After meeting with residents of Anne Arundel and surrounding counties who would be affected by the closure, Annapolis state Sen. Sarah Elfreth helped secure a contract to transfer the facility to the public with the state’s financial help. In a statement, Elfreth described the elevator as “essential infrastructure for our Southern Maryland and Anne Arundel County farmers.”
Once the purchase is complete, the county plans to lease the facility to a professional elevator operator and work with the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission on options for more agriculture support services at the site such as a commercial compost facility and possibly an artisanal mill.
Craig Sewell, an infrastructure project manager at the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission, said a mill could open all kinds of doors for residents in and around the agriculture industry including farmers, elevator operators, millers, food service professionals, marketers and people in sales and delivery.
“The rise of small artisanal millers across the country are proving the effectiveness and the financial viability of this burgeoning industry,” Sewell said in a statement.
Agriculture in the area has been steadily declining for decades. According to the Census of Agriculture, in 1945 the county had more than 121,000 acres in farms. By 1954, that was down to 101,000 acres, and by 1959 it fell to 81,000. In 1997, there were 34,679 acres in farming, and by 2017 that fell to 27,000 acres, a 20% decrease. Part of the reduction in South County farming activity is due to the decline of the tobacco industry, which was historically a significant crop in the area.
Watson-Hampton explained that, though the grain elevator in Lothian may only be one facility, it touches the careers of many local farmers.
“The Lothian Grain Elevator has been a vital and supportive part of the Southern Maryland agricultural economy for generations,” Watson-Hampton said. “While the elevator is comparatively small in size to some, its purchase and storage of wheat, corn and soybeans raised by local farms is indispensable to the success of local farming operations.”
Kayla Griffith’s 100-yearold family farm in Lothian is one of many that depends on the Lothian Grain Elevator. When her family, like many others in South County, switched from growing tobacco to grain during the decline of the tobacco industry, they came to depend on the nearby elevator as a place to bring and sell their product.
The switch from tobacco to grain is tough for many farmers as tobacco was more profitable for small farm families to harvest on small plots of land, Griffith said.
The closest grain elevators beside Lothian are on the Eastern Shore and in Virginia, she said. Smaller farms don’t have the types of trucks or commercial licenses to drive large quantities of grain that far, Griffith and Watson-Hampton said. It is also very expensive to store grain on the farm, they added. Griffith’s family only has smaller trucks they can quickly and easily bring to and from the nearby facility with smaller quantities of grain.
“The existence of the Lothian grain elevator allowed us to be able to do something on a smaller scale and still be able to profit because we didn’t have to invest in all of that infrastructure,” Griffith said. “There are definitely a lot of farmers in the Southern Maryland region that are smaller than us and very much so if the Lothian Grain Elevator went away, they would not be able to farm anymore.”