Brice Wallace
A large project area that supporters say can revitalize Utah’s agriculture industry could become the state’s next inland port location.
The proposed Six County Agri-Park, encompassing roughly 35,000 acres in three areas of Juab County, will be considered for approval Sept. 12 at 2 p.m. at a Utah Inland Port Authority board meeting in Nephi.
“Our intention with the Six County Agri-Park is to build a ‘landing strip,’ if you will, for agricultural processing, and I mean that across the board: ag tech facilities, ag processing facilities,” Darin Bushman, chairman of the Six County Association of Governments and a Piute County commissioner, told the board during its August meeting.
The Six County Agri-Park would include the 1,600-acre Currant Creek Industrial Park, the 27-acre Nortonville Rail Industrial Site, and the 33,700-acre Juab Agri-Park. It is envisioned to serve as a site for protein and other agricultural processing, agriculture technology, agriculture implements and tools, cold storage and value-added beef processing.
While supported by the Six County Association of Governments (Sanpete, Juab, Wayne, Millard, Piute and Sevier counties), the site would benefit farmers and Utahns in every county in the state, supporters say. The Agri-Park would include both rail and highway infrastructure to empower the production, processing, storage and transportation of goods both within Utah and to outside markets.
Bushman said the association had been looking for ways to increase agricultural producers’ margins, “and pretty quickly, what we found out was there is not the producer processing capacity to do that.”
“So, even if the family farm wanted to sell direct to U.S. consumers, there’s not the processing capacity to do that,” he told the UIPA board. “It doesn’t matter which model you look at, which protein source you look at, processing is the bottleneck. We have failed as a state to keep up processing capacity with population growth, and we have data to support that.”
Three obstacles to producer-to-consumer processing have been agricultural processing wastewater issues; residential encroachment; and financing the high-risk, industry-specific investments, he said.
Jenna Draper, economic development director for the association, said ag producers have been looking for ways to reduce their freight costs. “For them, looking at their books, if we could just somehow reduce their freight costs so they didn’t have to ship beef to Nebraska, they didn’t have to ship things out of state to be processed, that would help their operations pencil for future generations.”
In addition to helping producers’ ability to retain their children to work on the family farm, “if they can bring their goods to be processed there in Juab County rather than taking them across state lines, we are bringing the food security back within Utah’s borders,” Draper said. “We are strengthening Utah’s resiliency and strengthening the economic diversity within the six-county region and Utah as a state. … So, by bringing this processing and bringing this to the six-county region, we are opening up the global market for our producers and we are allowing them to continue their operations and continue the background of what this region really started up.”
Ben Hart, UIPA’s executive director, said the Agri-Park proposal is “exactly I feel like why the port was created,” with the authority working to help local communities advance what is in those communities’ best interest.
“This is awesome,” Hart said of the proposal. “This is really an amazing project.”
If approved, the Six County Agri-Park project area would become the fifth approved inland port location. It would join Salt Lake City’s, which includes parts of Magna, Salt Lake City, West Valley City and Salt Lake County; the 899-acre Iron Springs Inland Port near Cedar City that is being developed, owned and operated by BZI Steel; the 2,200-acre Verk Industrial Park project area in Spanish Fork; and the Golden Spike project area totaling 1,500 acres in Garland, Tremonton, Brigham City and other parts of Box Elder County.
UIPA says that three other communities have passed resolutions inviting the port authority to create project areas: Beaver County, Tooele County and Weber County.