Fayette should fight to keep the stockyards

Let’s imagine Lexington-Fayette County had the chance to attract a business that leads its industry in the eastern United States, has more than 60 employees, 44,000 customers who spend over $200 million a year there, and offers a critical market for an important existing industry which is essential to maintaining our treasured Bluegrass farmland.

A no-brainer, right?

Sadly, it wasn’t 10 years ago when the Bluegrass Stockyards tried to relocate from its location downtown near the Distillery District to a spot near the intersection of Interstate 75 and Ironworks Pike. The chorus of opposition, including from the Kentucky Horse Park across the highway, was so great that then-Gov. Ernie Fletcher asked the stockyards to look elsewhere.

They looked but found cold shoulders elsewhere, too. “They just don’t want us,” Larry Barber, one of the stockyard owners, said at the time. So, the stockyards remained at its aged, 13-acre home on Lisle Industrial Avenue, a neighbor to the Town Branch creek, to a sanitary-sewer pump station, and most recently to a $76 million city investment in stormwater-storage tanks — until a massive fire Jan. 30 destroyed the stockyards.

Although the business has expanded in the 10 years since the aborted attempt to move, building and buying satellite operations in other communities in Kentucky, the Lexington stockyards remained the hub and backbone of operations.

The owners want to build a new facility and feel “a strong pull to stay in Fayette County,” chief operating officer Jim Akers said Friday.

Still, there are options. On Wednesday he told the House Agriculture and Small Business Committee, “every exit off the interstate from Morehead to Shelbyville and the parkway from Lexington to E-town has called with the perfect piece of property.”

Fayette County leaders, public and private, must work hard to convince the owners the perfect property is in Fayette County.

There are a lot of reasons they should fight for the stockyards, but the most compelling is that Fayette is an agricultural county. As the numbers here show, there are over 700 farms in this county, comprising far more acreage than the urban core. The survival of the landscape we so treasure rests on the economic viability of those farms.

As the numbers indicate, our farm economy is built on the livestock that graze on that grass. Some are the horses that are so important to our culture and economy, but cattle are also essential to Fayette County’s farm economy. To maintain that grassland small farmers raising cattle — Akers said the average sale was six head — need a place to sell them. It’s that simple.

Several stockyard shareholders own the Ironworks property and it seems likely that if a new facility is built in Fayette it will either be there or at the downtown site. The Ironworks site also seems, as it did in 2006, like a good place for the business.

The location right off U.S. highways 64 and 75 would be convenient for sellers who haul cattle on trucks or trailers from farms all over Central Kentucky and beyond, and buyers who leave with loads on tractor-trailer rigs headed to the West or Midwest.

Akers says they can show “hard, independent evidence” that modern building and waste-handling technologies will mitigate both odor and environmental concerns, which include proximity to the Royal Springs Aquifer that provides water for Georgetown.

Plus, there is the common-sense observation that if the business could accommodate its neighbors on a small lot in a dense, urban setting, certainly it could work on a 100-acre site in the rural area of the county.

This story was originally published February 13, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Fayette should fight to keep the stockyards."