Last week, I wrote an ode to mayors, to the people whose job it is to address the economic challenges of urban communities. This week, I’m exploring rural economies, and an opportunity that we have before us in Anne Arundel County.
Economic growth has stagnated in many urban and rural communities, and the result has been higher rates of unemployment and poverty in both. Growing economic opportunity in urban and rural communities, however, is not the same.
Agriculture is the number one industry in most rural communities. That doesn’t just mean jobs on farms. Rural communities have networks of businesses that supply farms, provide services to farms, and distribute the products of farming to the marketplace. Economic development, which could also be described as survival for many rural communities, has been driven by diversification and science. State University ag extension programs bring the latest science to the farmers, and practices on the farms evolve. New crops, new methods of soil management, and new information about the marketplace all get introduced by government-funded institutions that farmers respect.
Rural economies are also very dependent for survival on government-supported hospitals and health clinics, schools, and other public services. When the rural area happens to be in a county with a strong tax base like Anne Arundel, those jobs and services tend to be locally funded. When they are in exclusively rural counties, they are more dependent on federal government support. Trump administration policies will hit rural communities hard.
Traditional farming in Anne Arundel County is small-scale, and land is expensive here. Many farming families inherited their land, managed to scrape together enough profit to stay in business, but then had nothing to retire on, so they sold some or all of their land. Farmland is disappearing.
But we need to eat, we need soil that can absorb rain and store it underground, and we need plants and healthy soil to hold carbon and make our air breathable. And when you ask even the urban and suburban residents of our county, they usually say that they want farms to produce and to thrive.
Our county’s award-winning Plan2040 is very clear about its ambitious goals to preserve farmland and make farming both profitable and sustainable. The Region Plans in the parts of our county that still have farmland are adamant about preserving it. In fact, the stakeholder committee for Region 8, the non-coastal southern part of our county where farms are most abundant, has been collecting comments on its draft plan in recent weeks, and the old slogan Keep South County Rural is as relevant as ever.
But that doesn’t mean residents want to continue the displacement of working people that happens when farms become subdivisions of mansions. Residents want housing that working people can afford, and they want economic activity. They especially want farms to be profitable, productive, and assets in our efforts to restore the area’s waterways.
You may remember the closure of Purdue’s southern Anne Arundel County grain elevator in 2021. Grain farmers throughout Southern Maryland asked the state and the county to step up and acquire the operation so that they would continue to have a nearby place to sell mostly corn and soybeans. We did, and we found an operator to run it.
Last year, that operator reported that he couldn’t make a profit, and no other operator could see a way to do any better. Local farmers reported that they were adapting. They either stopped growing grain, built their own silos, or contracted to have grain picked up and trucked to more distant locations.
Throughout the process, our county team had collaborated closely with the Southern Maryland Agriculture Development Corporation (SMADC), a multi-county institution that had been funded to establish a Regional Agricultural Center. The idea is that one location offers the value-added services to farms that most can’t afford on their own - things like freezing, packaging, and distribution. Their research showed in particular that farms in the area would be able to convert more land into sustainable grazing if there were a local place to process and package grass-fed livestock. The site was in St. Mary’s County, and design work was done. Then their deal with the county unraveled. They had no site.
I raised my hand. The Lothian grain elevator site is close to farms, and its proximity to Route 4 puts it minutes from major markets. Our Anne Arundel County Farm Bureau has been advocating for a regional ag center for years, and the closer the better. Governor Moore and Maryland Secretary of Agriculture Atticks want to connect and grow the state’s ag economy. The Make America Healthy Again movement that has the ear of some in the Trump administration says that we need to reorient our food systems to work locally. We have an opportunity.
So we asked our team at Economic Development to produce a market study to tell us what a Regional Ag Center at that site could do to provide more opportunity to our farms and better food for our people. Like everything we do, we will engage stakeholders, especially farmers. The RFP for the study is here.
I can’t promise today that we’ll be able to put all the pieces together to make this economic driver a reality, but like so much of what we do in government, it’s about markets, opportunity, and public benefit. I have a feeling that this one checks all the boxes, so we’ll put our hearts and minds into making it happen.
Until next week…