Ag, elected officials scheming to save ailing grain elevator

LOTHIAN, Md. — As planting season approaches, Southern Maryland officials continue to discuss options to save an Anne Arundel County grain elevator that Perdue AgriBusiness plans to sell or shutter.

Participants in those discussions, including Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman, were tight-lipped about specific proposals last week, including one, rumored among growers, that would have the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission operate the facility.

“We don’t have anything definitive, but we’re working on it,” Pittman said. “Those conversations are sensitive, and we have to keep them to ourselves until we have further information.”

Officials said any solution would need to be finalized soon. Perdue AgriBusiness agreed to keep the facility open for an additional two years after initially trying to close it in March 2021, citing a decline in regional grain production. The grain arm of the massive poultry integrator has placed the 1 million-square-foot elevator at 6272 Southernmost Road on the real estate market for $1.25 million. It includes nine bins that can store up to 1 million bushels, a scale house, fertilizer building, and a shipping and receiving pit.

Discussions to keep the elevator open have included Pittman, SMADC, Anne Arundel County Councilwoman Shannon Leadbetter, state Sen. Sarah K. Elfreth and other regional legislators. Leadbetter confirmed the conversations but declined to discuss them in detail. Elfreth, D-Anne Arundel, released a short statement.

“Agriculture is essential to the economy and culture of Southern Maryland,” she said. “We are working with farmers and State and local officials regionally to find a way to keep the grain elevator operating — it’s essential infrastructure to our ag community.”

Perdue briefly introduced the possibility of recruiting Southern Maryland farmers to raise Plenish soybeans to keep the elevator open, but a meeting to discuss the issue was abruptly canceled in September after a Perdue spokesperson said that too few farmers could attend the meeting. Though several farmers and officials said the company canceled the event due to media interest.

As of press time, a Perdue spokesperson had not responded to a series of emailed questions from The Delmarva Farmer. Local officials said Perdue initially demanded that any buyer of the Lothian elevator be required to sell their grain to Perdue — a stipulation that would likely discourage buyers — but Scott Douglas, an Annapolis real estate broker selling the elevator, said he’s been given no such restriction. Even a competitor could buy it, he said.

Perdue just wants “to wipe their hands clean,” he said. “If Tyson wanted to buy it, Perdue would allow it.”

Any new buyer would likely need to renovate and update the facility, Brooks Nagel, grain merchandiser at Nagel Farm Service in Wye Mills, told The Delmarva Farmer last March. Nagel toured the facility when Perdue and the state were recruiting potential buyers.

“In the rest of the elevator community, it’s seen as a 1970s elevator that needs a lot of maintenance,” Nagel said.

The impending closure of the facility has troubled the regional ag community, which fears that some smaller grain producers could leave farming altogether without a nearby buyer. Larger producers in the region may have the trucking capacity to move their grain to other Perdue facilities near Baltimore or on the Eastern Shore; for smaller producers, that could prove difficult.

Ben Wood, a Calvert County farmer, said he took all of his beans, 60 percent of his corn and half of his wheat to Lothian. He wasn’t sure how he’d respond to the facility’s closure.

“It would affect us severely,” he said.

Some in eastern or northern Anne Arundel County could maybe move their grain over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to an elevator in Wye Mills, he said. The closest facility to him is the Wicomico Grain Elevator in Charlotte Hall. It could potentially absorb a small percentage of Lothian’s grain, facility Manager Chris Cullins said.

“We pretty much fill up with what grain we have coming here already,” he said. “We might be able to take a few more bushels, but not what they need.”

Wicomico accepts between 750,000 and 1 million bushels of corn, soybeans, wheat and milo a year, he said.

S.L. Brady, an Anne Arundel County grower, said he fears a number of veteran farmers may quit or rent their acreage out instead of switching to another field crop. “They’re way up in age right now, and if they get out, they’re getting out,” he said.

The disappearance of the Lothian elevator as an option would be another infrastructural blow to Southern Maryland agriculture, said Colby Ferguson, government relations director at the Maryland Farm Bureau.

“Sometimes (the problem) isn’t the farmer going out of business, it’s the farmer losing the services they need to be successful. If nothing comes about, and there’s not another option, some of those (farmers) that are kind of looking for a reason to retire, it will push them to that.”

Southern States built the elevator roughly four decades ago, and Perdue purchased it in 2002. 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. Anne Arundel County’s harvested grain acreage declined by nearly a third over the last two decades.

“We really need this facility operating to serve our local farmers,” Pittman said.