Room For Growth
Rockingham County Herb Supplier Plans $8.7 Million Expansion
Posted: March 31, 2015
By VIC BRADSHAW
HARRISONBURG — A Rockingham County herb-growing business was announced Monday as the recipient of $200,000 in state and local funds to fertilize its latest expansion.
Shenandoah Growers, one of the nation’s largest producers of fresh herbs, will receive $100,000 from the state and $100,000 from the county for an $8.7 million expansion project in two locations. The project is expected to create 15 jobs over the next three years.
“The things they’re doing here with agriculture and entrepreneurship are second to none,” Todd Haymore, Virginia’s secretary of agriculture and forestry, said in one of the company’s greenhouses on Koehn Drive, about 12 miles northeast of Harrisonburg.
Haymore, accompanied Monday by Virginia’s first lady, Dorothy McAuliffe, was there to announce the state award from the Governor’s Agriculture and Forestry Industries Development program.
“The products grown here in the Valley are going to be spread further across the country and hopefully internationally sometime soon,” he said.
McAuliffe, who attended the event along with top state agriculture officials, most of the area’s state legislators, and numerous Rockingham County leaders, touted the Old Dominion’s agriculture operations.
Shenandoah Growers and other Virginia companies, she said, “are adding more flavor and taste options to the food that sustains us.”
The expansion project will increase the company’s production capacity by half and its product yield by 20 percent, Haymore said.
It is expected to result in $15 million in new sales during the next three years.
Company President and CEO Timothy Heydon said the grant money “helps ensure the project will get done and be complete on time. This is a relatively big project, and it’s helpful in the total financing on that.”
Splitting Operations
Shenandoah Growers is expanding at its site on Koehn Drive at the base of the Massanutten Mountain ridgeline in northeastern Rockingham County, as well as moving its headquarters and adding distribution to buildings at 3156 N. Valley Pike, just south of Interstate 81’s Exit 251.
Heydon said the 75,000-square-foot expansion project would allow the company to have 245,000 square feet of greenhouse space. The price tag for that work is $6.7 million.
Construction began in December, he said, and the first phase should be finished in May. The third and final phase is expected to wrap up in 2016.
Another $2 million is to be spent on the office relocation and the warehouse that increases Shenandoah Growers’ distribution capacity.
While the county is chipping in half the total award, it expects to get that money back quickly. George Anas II, Rockingham’s economic development director, said new real estate and machinery and tools taxes anticipated from the project should total more than $100,000 in less than two years.
“I’m really thankful for the county’s support and the commonwealth’s,” Heydon said. “I haven’t done business in another area that was so supportive of growth and job growth.”
Technology Business
Shenandoah Growers isn’t merely producing and distributing herbs. The 25-year-old company is using cutting-edge, proprietary technology to grow better plants for consumers.
LED lights are used in the growing process to help the herbs grow stronger, enhance their flavor and aroma, and have a darker green color, Heydon said. The plants are watered with nitrogen-infused rainwater collected from rooftops at the complex.
Most of the company’s products are either conventionally grown or certified organic herbs sold in bunches or packaged. It also markets live organic herbs.
Its herbs are shipped from Boston to Miami on the East Coast and as far west as Texas, Chicago and Wisconsin. Heydon estimated that the company accounts for about 20 percent of sales to the U.S. retail grocery market, with organic products accounting for 60 percent of its sales.
Carrie Chenery, the Shenandoah Valley Partnership’s new executive director, said she was among the people who worked on Shenandoah Growers’ grant as Virginia’s assistant secretary of agriculture and forestry, and she thinks it’s the type of project the grant program program was meant to support.
“You have an entrepreneur with a connection to a local higher education university [James Madison] with a focus on innovative products that is doing something with leading-edge technology and sustainable practices,” she said.
Haymore said success stories like Shenandoah Growers can help state officials recruit more greenhouse operations.
“Greenhouse agribusiness,” he said, “has a reputation that once you establish yourself as a place where it’s thriving, you attract more.”
Contact Vic Bradshaw at 574-6279 or [email protected]
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