Gainesville, GA |

Some of the top agricultural leaders, not just in the state, but the entire country, were on hand to get a first-hand look at this new student run meat processing facility at the Hall County Agribusiness Center. It’s a brand-new space with top-of-the-line equipment that needless to say, left everyone very impressed.

“If we could just take this and multiply it across this country, there’d be a lot of young people that have a different appreciation for the food and how gets to the grocery store. When your children learn about it, they teach your parents about it. So, it’s really a fantastic facility. What a way to really let people start their life knowing where their food comes from and how valuable it is to them and how difficult sometimes it is to get it there,” says Zippy Duvall, President of American Farm Bureau.

That’s especially true with meat processing, as a lack of operations, especially in smaller communities, was the idea behind this three-year project.

“One of the things that we believe here locally is that we are in the middle of a crisis in terms of our protein supply, that it has become all multinational. And so, with some support of some key leaders in the state of Georgia and the usage of some Covid funding, we have brought a fully operational commercial processing plant that students and their teacher run here in Gainesville, Georgia,” says Will Schofield, Superintendent of Hall County Schools.

For the most part, this facility serves as a closed, self-sustainable operation as all the meat coming through is both locally sourced and consumed.

“We raise the animals in the community. We get our hogs from the University of Georgia. We process it here locally, and then it goes back into this community. We are the largest food supplier in the Hall County proper, which is a community of about two hundred and forty thousand people, but we serve twenty-five thousand meals a day in our local school food service programs. So, a lot of the ground beef, a lot of the pork will go right back into school food lunches. We also have sales for local individuals. We do custom work for local farmers. So, what we process here, ninety nine percent of it gets consumed in Hall County,” says Schofield.

However, the impact of this program will be felt far beyond the Hall County borders, as it will provide a much-needed boost to the agricultural workforce.

“Kids think they all have to go to college and get a four-year degree. And that’s wonderful. We need people to do that, but there’s so many opportunities out there, well-paying opportunities for people to go in different directions and do the work that this country has been developed on, and built on, work that you do with your hands and your brain. This is a good way to introduce kids into all the different opportunities in a job, careers in agriculture,” says Duvall.

“We’ve got a Board of Education, we’ve got a community that wants young people to know that agribusiness, at least in Georgia, especially in Hall County, where seventy percent of our GDP is agribusiness, that agribusiness, absolutely is an economic engine. And we better appreciate it because we all sit down at the table every night and we take advantage of the bounty that agribusiness produces for us,” says Schofield.

By: Damon Jones