“It’s a unique little deal,” said Cave, who heads the Surry office of the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service. “The thought process started a couple of years ago as a way to get younger people involved in agriculture and open up new marketing opportunities for smaller farms.”
Cave is speaking of the coming value-added agriculture center which will be located in an old warehouse building in Pilot Mountain.
The center, which is not a co-op, would be a place where people who grow on a small scale could bring their products to have them graded, packaged, shipped and marketed, allowing farmers to receive a higher price for their goods.
The food would be sold to chefs in regional restaurants as well as to institutions such as schools and hospitals. The center would become a hub for farmers in Surry, Stokes and Forsyth counties.
“The local food movement is starting to grow, and we hope to capitalize on that,” said Cave.
Cave and Knopf began looking into such a center about three years ago, gaining support in the form of a Golden LEAF grant as a way for tobacco farmers who were no longer growing tobacco to continue to make a living off their land.
They hired a company to complete a marketing study to determine what products people in the area would want to buy from the center and hope to have that study completed in October. They will then take that information and use it to train farmers to grow the products that will be most in demand to have the center up and running by late March or early April.
Also included in this plan are the students in the area high schools taking agriculture courses. One of the requirements for the courses is to complete a project in which they have to grow goods. The center would allow them to make a little money while completing the project by having them sell through the agriculture center.
One of the benefits of the center is it will allow people to have smaller gardens in their yard rather than having to pay the exorbitant start-up fees for a farm.
“Given it’s so hard and there’s so much money up front, the vo-ag teachers have really bought in to this,” said Cave. “It’s something the students can do in their own backyard.”
He hopes to work with the high schools to identify the students who might be interested in participating in the program in order to include them in the training sessions in the fall. Some of the high schools have even discussed the idea of doing a class project revolving around the center.
“A lot of those students seem to be real interested when they hear about that,” he said.
Cave spoke at the May 4 Surry County Board of Education meeting at the request of Dr. Ashley Hinson, superintendent, about the impact of agriculture on Surry County and the role students can play.
He reported that agriculture is North Carolina’s number one industry and employer, making up about 21 percent of the workforce. In Surry County alone in 2006, agriculture contributed $461,900,981, about 23.3 percent of the total economy.
“We have to teach these young people financial management, we need to talk about entrepreneurship, they need interpersonal communication skills, they need an integrated experience and they need hands-on experiences,” Cave told board members.
The average investment to start a farm for infrastructure alone is around $662,000 with the average farm consisting of 102 acres.
This center would allow the students to bypass those costs and operate on a smaller, more manageable scale.
“Enrollment is going up in ag courses. At East Surry last year, we had too many students and we anticipate that happening again,” said Jill Reinhardt, director of CTE/technology, to board members. “We’re taking a very close look at what we’re doing in CTE.”
Contact Morgan Wall at mwall@mtairynews.com or 719-1929.
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