DarCo Progress talks agribusiness future
By Samantha Lyles, Staff Writer, slyles@newsandpress.net
The potential role of food processing took center stage last week as Darlington County Progress, the private business arm of the public / private economic development partnership between Darlington County and local business and industry, held its 2016 annual meeting September 29 at the SiMT conference center.
Guest speaker Jack Shuler of the Palmetto AgriBusiness Council spoke to Progress members about the need for east coast food processing plants and the potential financial gains Darlington County could reap by focusing on this industry.
Darlington County Economic Development director Frank Willis
“Darlington County is just right for agribusiness,” said Shuler, noting the county’s rich history with farming and agriculture, and encouraging all present to keep “top of the mind awareness” for opportunities in this rich and growing field of development.
Shuler said that agribusiness represents a $42 billion a year industry in South Carolina, with $18 billion from forestry and $24 billion from agriculture. Breaking it down further, he added that 48-percent of that $24 billion comes from the poultry industry alone.
Food processing plants could provide a stable financial anchor for Darlington County, Shuler said, because they are “non-cyclical” due to the constant market demand for food and the prohibitive cost of shipping food from other countries or even from the west coast of the United States. Shuler noted that it costs on average about $6,000 to transport a container of food grown in California to the east coast, and said that costs would be notably lower if farming states like South Carolina had more food processing and packaging plants.
“Everybody eats,” Shuler observed. “So that industry is typically going to be here, and is not going to leave here to go overseas.”
Jack Shuler of the Palmetto AgriBusiness Council
Photos by Samantha Lyles
He encouraged Darlington County to invest in spec buildings engineered for the needs of the food processing industry. Such a building would need a few specific characteristics: concrete walls, 28-foot ceilings, linear design (perhaps 200 feet by 600 feet), and loading / unloading areas at the front and rear. Shuler said having such a building ready made at a local industrial park could quickly draw interest from a food processing company.
Other areas of growing interest for agribusiness include the cutting-edge field of genomics, which Clemson University dominates and plans to develop further. Shuler said that Clemson recently spent $7 million to upgrade the Pee Dee Research and Education Center labs for plant genomics research, an investment which could make our area an experimental crop hub.
“Clemson holds the largest catalog of plant genetics in the world, so we think there is an opportunity for Clemson to develop new varieties and new products. You could grow them in this area, have seed companies come in, and that’s all part of economic development,” said Shuler.
The Palmetto AgriBusiness Council was formed in July of 2015 to help guide and grow the development of the farming, food processing, forestry, genomics, and agri-tourism industries in South Carolina.
Darlington County Economic Development director Frank Willis thanked Darlington County Council for funding the completion of two certified industrial parks, which can now be advertised and marketed to industry.
Willis lauded the $10 million investment from Innovative Solar Systems for a new 185-acre solar farm in the Byrdtown Community. He also told Progress members that he continues to work on “Project Lazarus,” an economic development initiative code named for confidentiality, and he hopes to have good news to announce in the near future.