Landing the grant is turning out to be far from the end of the road in an effort to bring a cattle loading facility to Jackson County.
This spring, the Southwestern N.C. Resource Conservation and Development Council received $22,500 toward the project from the Tennessee Valley Authority Ag and Forestry Fund, managed by WNC Communities. It’s a much-needed resource, the council’s director Lynne Sprague said, that would help farmers combine their cattle to get better prices and allow access to equipment that might be too expensive for a small cattleman to purchase himself.
The problem, though, is where to put it.
When Sprague applied for the grant, he thought that was an easy answer. He was then working with Gerald Green, county planner at the time, on a plan to turn the empty 82,000-square-foot Drexel factory in Whittier into the Smoky Mountain Agricultural Development Station, a Mecca that would draw farmers from all around the western region to use equipment, take classes and sell their wares. The cattle loading facility would easily fit on the 21-acre property, and the facility had the support of county commissioners.
But the building renovation, it turned out, did not. When a building assessment revealed a $1.7 million price tag to get the Drexel building up to code, commissioners nixed the idea of renovating the building. The idea of building the cattle facility there died as well, because the property is in a floodplain. Construction in a floodplain triggers a slew of additional regulations, and with the Drexel renovation currently off the table, building the cattle facility there appears to be a no-go.
“I do not support at all anything in Drexel right now,” Commission Chairman Brian McMahan said when the building assessment results came back in June. “There’s just too much unknown and we’ve got some real serious decisions to make about the fate of that property.”
So, Sprague and Rob Hawk, director of Jackson and Swain Cooperative Extension, along with the Jackson County Farmland Protection Board and the Cattleman’s Association, would run the day-to-day of the cattle facility, and if completed, work with the county to identify other potential locations. County commissioners thought they might have a winner when they voted to look into putting the cattle facility on a 4.1-acre county property along U.S. 441 at the intersection with Calvary Church Road.
Turns out, not so much.
“At the back of the property is a stream called Savannah Creek,” County Manager Chuck Wooten told commissioners last week. “It has a 30-foot buffer on each side because it does feed into a trout stream, and the rest of the site is on a floodplain.”
That excludes the kind of construction a cattle-loading facility would require, and the clock is ticking if Jackson County is to benefit from the grant funds.
“It will take months to get it sited, to get the plans and then get it built,” Hawk said. “We just need a site as soon as possible.”
The money has to be spent by June 2016, and because the original grant was written to build a cattle facility at Drexel in conjunction with a full-fledged agricultural center, the team will have to get approval to use the grant funds on a different site. By the time the next granting cycle rolls around in September, at the very latest, they’d have to have it pinned down, Sprague said.
They’re contemplating a piece of county property that’s near the Drexel site just above the railroad tracks and out of the floodplain. It’s currently being used by a private farmer and is an oddly shaped piece of land that might be too small, but it’s in the right location to benefit the area Hawk hopes the facility would serve.
He’s also starting conversations with private landowners, seeing if any of them might be willing to allow the facility on their land.
If they can’t find a place in Jackson County, there’s a chance to funds could go to build one in Swain County, which also lacks this kind of resource for cattlemen. But Jackson County is the preference. It’s more central, and more cattle are raised there — 800 to 1,200 at any given time compared with 500 to 600 in Swain County.
“Really around the Whittier, Swain, Cherokee area is where it needs to be,” Hawk said, because Haywood and Macon County both have cattle facilities.
But even once a site is chosen and the grant funds disbursed, the cattle facility’s future won’t be secure. The grant covers $22,500 for equipment purchases such as a corral, a weighing scale and a hydraulic squeeze chute. But it would likely take another $60,000 to or so to complete the project, according to the grant application, though Sprague believes the additional work could be done for as little as $30,000.
A combination of personal donations and further grant funding would hopefully bring in the rest of the funds, Sprague said.
“It’s a matter of the chicken and the egg, what comes first,” he said. “We’ve got the equipment and then we can go out and get grants for the building.”
The project could be completed piecemeal. Much of the remaining cost would come from building the structures — roof and shed — not covered by the equipment grant. But the equipment could be stored in something much less elaborate until money becomes available to build the whole structure.
It might be a long road, but both Sprague and Hawk are adamant about the benefit that a functioning cattle loading facility could offer area cattlemen. The facility would allow them to congregate their cattle, saving fuel and time, reducing cattle stress and weight loss and allowing for better sale prices due to buyers being able to pick up cattle from multiple farmers at once.
“Cattle prices are extremely high, as high as they’ve ever been, and I’ve been encouraging people to get back in the beef business,” said Jackson County Commissioner Boyce Dietz, who owns just shy of 20 head of cattle. “But a lot of people don’t have the expertise and knowledge of how to handle cattle.
“We need some kind of way to help people do that.”