Lavonia, GA

With everything from chicken to peaches, to tomatoes being brought in each and every week, the Franklin County Processing Facility has its hands full satisfying customers during the summer. However, the finished product is always up to their standards considering they are the ones overseeing the entire process.

“One of the basic things I think is for the community members to be able to come in and preserve their own home-grown vegetables and they know what’s in their products. Patrons bring in their raw materials and then we educate and help them process their goods and sealing them into four one-quart cans or glass jars, quarts or pints,” says Cale Watkins, Franklin County Ag Teacher.

This learning experience is made possible thanks to a group of dedicated ag teachers who keep this unique operation up and running despite having limited resources.

“The agriculture teachers, this is part of our extended year contract to run the food processing center. I think there are about twenty-six in the state left. Some facilities have an additional staff, we don’t. It’s all manned by our agriculture department and our teachers here. There are four of us in the department and we run the facility as a part of our extended year contract,” says Watkins.

While the manpower will likely remain the same, that can’t be said for the equipment, most of which is more than seven decades old. Thanks to a recent hundred-thousand-dollar grant, this operation will undergo a major transformation starting next summer.

“We anticipate being able to replace our tunnel, our exhaust tunnel which heats the cans up. Ours it in poor shape. Most of the equipment in this facility has been here since the forties. We also will be able to purchase another sealer, which is vital to putting the lid upon the can. So, we hope to be able to buy another sealer and then possibly a new retort as well with this hundred-thousand-dollar grant,” says Watkins.

That new equipment is essential to maintaining both quality and food safety, as canning and jarring products is a very precise method of preserving food.

“They’ll wash them and then we’ll put them into a blancher, then blanch them, get the internal temperature up to kill things like botulism so forth. Then we’ll package them in a can or a jar. The cans will then go through an atmospheric tunnel and then the tunnel will heat up the internal temperature to a hundred seventy, a hundred eighty degrees. Then, we’ll seal the can on the other end of the tunnel. Glass jars will get boiling hot water over top of them to seal them. Then, they will go into a retort, which is just basically a giant pressure cooker,” says Watkins.

Even though this is a process that can technically be done at home, having facilities like this make it easier and much less time consuming.

“One of the big advantages to using our food processing facility is it is much simpler than it would be at home. Cleanup is easy. You can clean it up with a water hose and it cuts the time down. Customers would spend all day doing a product at home that they could do in thirty minutes to an hour here at the food processing center,” says Watkins.

By: Damon Jones