Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Ag Economic Development topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Senate Agriculture Committee reviews framework to allocate $5 million for ag economic development
Summary
The Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture adopted a committee substitute for Senate Bill 28 and heard Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Jonathan Shell outline how the $5 million set in the 2024 budget would target processors and end-user investments, citing growth in the state's poultry and livestock processing sectors.
The Kentucky Senate Standing Committee on Agriculture adopted a committee substitute for Senate Bill 28 and heard testimony on using a $5,000,000 2024 budget allocation for ag economic development.
Committee Chair Howe opened the session and recognized visiting agriculture leadership groups before members moved to adopt a committee substitute for SB28. "Motion by senator Yates. Second by senator Richardson," the clerk recorded, and the chair called the voice vote; the clerk recorded the substitute as adopted.
The committee then heard from Jonathan Shell, Kentucky commissioner of agriculture, who said the bill "puts the framework around the ag economic development money that we dropped in the 2024 budget." Shell told the committee the enabling legislation would set the parameters for how the funds "will be allocated through the Department of Agriculture." He said the goal is to attract "end users, processors, further processing" facilities rather than only production.
Shell described recent industry growth to illustrate demand for processing and related investments. He said Kentucky's agricultural cash receipts rose from about $3.1 billion in 1996 to $8.3 billion in the most recent report he cited, and that poultry's share grew from about 5% of cash receipts to about 25%. "We now have about 5 major processing facilities in the state of Kentucky around poultry. Each of those facilities process 1,300,000 chickens or more a week," he said, adding that those plants support "12 to 1,400 jobs in each" facility and supply chains of hundreds of farmers. Shell also cited processors such as JBS in Louisville and described a Hopkinsville facility and regional corn markets, saying roughly "30 percent of the corn that we have goes to our poultry operations in the state of Kentucky." He described the Hopkinsville elevator as a "750,000,000 business" and said the JBS facility processes about "10,500 hogs a day."
The committee substitute for SB28 and the testimony focused on using the $5 million allocation to support projects that create processing capacity and end-user markets, a policy emphasis Shell said would help expand markets for Kentucky producers. The transcript contains no further recorded votes on SB28 in this excerpt.
Next steps for SB28 were not recorded in the provided transcript excerpt.
