Charlottesville Tomorrow reports:
British poultry company plans to invest $2.3 million to open a specialty production and processing plant in Crozet, its first operation in the U.S., officials announced Thursday.
Here’s the location, using the County GIS.
And on Google Maps –
Jobs and agriculture. Should be good, right?
Update: the folks from Kelly Turkeys USA stopped by the facebook post and answered a bunch of the questions. I tried to embed the comments below, but they really don’t convey that well in the storify format.
Good comments from the facebook post –
Picture your next drive (or bike ride) out Jarmans Gap Rd and then picture sharing that narrow, winding road with a never-ending convoy of 18-wheelers hauling supplies and turkeys to and fro, up and down the road along with you. Anybody talking about widening the road or turning it into a four-lane divided highway yet? Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.
It doesn’t seem like there will be a huge amount of traffic from this plant. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to be at all like the turkey plants in the valley. From the article: “A branch of a British company known for its unique breed of turkeys, the KellyBronze, Kelly USA plans to offer 100 percent Virginia grown premium turkeys. The company dry-ages and dry-plucks its turkeys, and the birds spend the majority of their lives outside, officials said.”
Sure hope you’re right, David! Keeping my fingers crossed! Only time will tell.
From an email commenter:
Will this be a humane operation or a cruel factory farm production? Please let us know more about how this $2.3million investment plan will be conducted…..very interested as I am sure others will be. Teaching children, who will know about this plants operations, humane treatment of animals is the very best way to bring about more humane practices in the future. Thank you.
My understanding–and I am intensely interested in this because my property is next door!–is that this will be a free-range, organic turkey farm designed to capture “old ways” of growing the birds. That said, I’ve asked Ann Mallek to check in with VDOT to please make sure everyone’s thinking about the traffic and safety issues. I am hoping the owners will start sharing more info with all of us and that we can all be good neighbors in this agricultural area.
Amazed at the lack of even basic knowledge about this. Turkeys do not need humans to exist. They are naturally free range and cross your property now whether you know it or not.
These birds are for a limited, high end market. I expect that the grape farms attract more traffic than this place would. But, Keep saying the words safety, humane and 18-wheelers and maybe you can scare them away. The area is zoned right for it and if it can create a few jobs than it is accomplishing more for the area than the complainers are. I don’t like the fact
that they are a foreign company but, I’ll never buy one of their birds anyway…