A cooperative effort to keep farmland in production

Our Opinion

Friday, Feb. 13, 2009

With the tobacco buyout beginning in 1999, just about every tobacco farmer in the region was left looking for different ways to make use of their knowledge and their land. We have seen an influx of corn mazes and pumpkin patches — all part of a segment of farming known as "agritourism."

And many farmers are investing a good amount of money and time in grapes. It takes years of growing the vines before the first crop is useful.

The state has supplied help, through initiatives to educate current and potential grape farmers on how to sustain the crop. More help has come in the form of grants — close to $400,000 between 2005 and 2008. Those grants have gone to research, promotion and expansion of vineyards and wineries.

About $65,000 has gone to help 27 grape growers buy vines. Free advice is being given by a viticulture expert and plant pathologist at the University of Maryland, also paid for by state grant money.

The St. Mary's County government and the town of Leonardtown are pitching in as well, to help the Southern Maryland Wine Grower's Cooperative set up the Port of Leonardtown Winery in an old State Highway Administration garage in town. The town has donated the building, and the county government has budgeted nearly $500,000 to support the project, with most of that going to the help renovate the building.

The co-op is raising additional money to go along with the county funds.

The co-op has 17 members, growing more than 13,000 vines on 20 acres. The hope is to have the winery ready to start turning grapes into wine late this summer with this year's crop, and have 6,000 gallons of wine ready to market by 2010.

Why is the government investing so much to help a private cooperative of growers start a business? Because the government systematically and deliberately killed the tobacco market that had sustained Southern Maryland farms for hundreds of years. They killed tobacco by paying farmers for 10 years not to grow it, using money from a settlement with tobacco companies.

Now that the 10 years of tobacco payments are almost over, the trick is to keep farm land as farm land. That's critical to the vision of St. Mary's County future that has been accepted by this community and encouraged by zoning and land-use regulations.There is near unanimous agreement that St. Mary's should not be allowed to become just one more sprawling, faceless East Coast suburb. That can't be achieved unless farmland is still productive.

The government's stake is an investment in a cooperative that, if successful, will expand to include many more growers.

It's been years in the planning, and in the next 18 months or so may begin to pay off.