By Michael Howell
Last week the County Commissioners agreed to be the sponsoring agent in a grant application to USDA to help fund a feasibility study that would examine the potential for constructing and operating a food processing center at the Ravalli County Entrepreneurship building where the Ravalli County Economic Development Authority is located on Old Corvallis Road.
The building will be losing a major tenant when the Bitterroot College moves to a new location on Main Street in Hamilton this summer. According to RCEDA executive Director Julie Foster, they are considering the potential of using about 500 to 1,000 square feet of the vacated building space to house a food processing center that could be used by various businesses making value added food products.
Foster said that there has been some demand for such a processing facility in the past expressed by local producers of things such as jams and sauces. Many options could be accommodated in such a facility, she said, such as slicing and packaging locally grown vegetables.
“We have looked around at other facilities,” said Foster, “and discovered a wide variety of operations and a big range in scale.” She said they would probably be looking at something on the small to medium size such as the facility in Livingston, Montana.
The aim of the feasibility study would be to determine if the demand in the valley for such services is significant enough to support such a facility and determine what kind of improvements would be required and get an estimated cost of any remodel.
“There are a lot of questions that need to be answered and this study would provide those answers,” said Foster.
If the USDA grant is awarded it would cover half the cost of the $16,000 study and the other half would be sought from the state, possibly through the state’s Growth Through Agriculture program.