A year later, future of So. Md. elevator still in question

LOTHIAN, Md. — A year after the Southern Maryland agricultural community successfully pleaded with Perdue Agribusiness to delay the closure of a regional grain elevator, no clear plans to save the facility have materialized yet, growers and local officials said.

Perdue promised to keep the Anne Arundel County elevator open for two additional growing seasons after its announcement to close the facility last March shocked regional growers. Many have said they fear the Lothian facility’s closure may make it too expensive to grow grain in the region and may even put some smaller farms out of business.

Whispers about potential buyers for the facility have circulated region-wide for the last several months, county Executive Steuart Pittman said.

“Every time there’s a rumor of a buyer it doesn’t seem to go through,” he said.

A Perdue spokesperson said on March 4 that the company had no updates, but farmers and agricultural workers said several parties have entertained purchasing the elevator, which was built by Southern States about four decades ago. Perdue purchased it in 2002.

Nagel Farm Service, an Eastern Shore grain merchant in Wye Mills, was one of those parties, said Brooks Nagel, the company’s grain merchandiser. The company was contacted last spring after Pittman and the Maryland Department of Agriculture urged Perdue to delay the facility’s closure and search for buyers. Nagel’s company eventually toured the elevator but declined to buy it, Nagel said. The company had recently updated many of its own elevators and in Lothian saw a facility that would need a similar overhaul.

“In the rest of the elevator community, it’s seen as a 1970s elevator that needs a lot of maintenance,” Nagel said. “We just weren’t ready to do that again, especially for an elevator that was out of our comfort zone on the Eastern Shore.”

He said he felt that the facility would need to expand its pit, which transfers grain into the elevator, to better accommodate the industry’s rise in grain yields, and its worn storage tanks need to be patched up.

“That would definitely be the end of some farmers down there if that place were to close up,” Nagel said.

Anne Arundel County continues to search for ways to keep the elevator in operation, Pittman said. The county’s newly restructured agricultural commission is more focused on commercial agriculture than it’s been in the past, and the Lothian elevator is viewed as a critical piece of the county’s agricultural infrastructure, he said.

The county is investigating possible federal funding for agricultural infrastructure, a process that may require the cooperation of other Southern Maryland counties, Pittman said. The elevator site also has additional land that could be used to provide agricultural services such as a farmers market or food warehousing.

“We’re committed in Anne Arundel County to making sure our farms can remain viable and actually increase production of food,” Pittman said. “I’m optimistic about our chances of keeping an elevator at that site.”

The alternative worries Ben Wood, a grain producer in Calvert County. Many of Southern Maryland’s farmers lack the grain bins necessary to store their harvested acreage and either move it themselves or have it trucked to buyers farther away, he said.

“It’s going to be a tough thing for a lot of people, I’m afraid,” he said. “At least a few people I’ve talked to have said if they close that facility they’re probably out. They’d probably be out of agriculture all together.”

When Perdue agreed to delay the closure, optimistic farmers and local officials floated several ideas to keep the elevator open. In addition to new buyers, Pittman initially suggested the possibility of a cooperative. Perdue also discussed the possibility of bolstering the facility by expanding it into a receiving station for excess poultry litter from the Eastern Shore.

But as Southern Maryland’s agricultural industry shrank over the last several decades due to several factors including suburban growth, the Lothian elevator became less profitable, Perdue officials said. Anne Arundel County’s harvested grain acreage declined by nearly a third over the last two decades. Several farmers said the company likely spent about $1 million a year operating the elevator.

Local farmers and ag workers said they see a company that no longer needs the grain produced by the region which must be trucked to other facilities. While the Eastern Shore’s poultry industry consumes more grain than the region produces, Perdue can probably acquire what it needs more efficiently from other regions via rail, barge or having larger farmers truck it to other Perdue facilities, Wood said.

Perdue “needs the corn,” he said. “But I think the people in the back room with the sharp pencils have looked at it and penciled out Lothian as too costly for business. What is Lothian to them in a sense?”

Perdue Farms CEO Randy Day is sympathetic to the ag community’s needs, Pittman said, but the facility’s future after this growing season remains unknown.

“Beyond this fall, (Day) said all bets are off,” Pittman said.

Over the last year, on multiple occasions, Wood said he’s asked the operator who runs the scale house at the grain elevator if there’s any good news about the facility’s future.

“His answer always is, ‘No’,” he said.