Anson County, North Carolina

ANSON COUNTY , NORTH CAROL INA is a new plant being built by Catawba Biogas, a leading operator of renewable energy facilities. Located in the heart of the “Broiler Belt,” Anson County is home to more than 940 poultry houses and produces 5.5 million broiler chickens, annually. “Traditionally, farmers would clean out the chicken houses with a combination of sawdust and chicken waste and they’d dump it in on fields as fertilizer,” Marek explains. “The problem with that is there’s a lot of runoff into streams and groundwater. And after a certain point, the chemicals in that fertilizer build up in the soil and it becomes counter-productive.” “So, we started working with Catawba Biogas about three years ago,” he continues. “They’re going to take a large percentage of the chicken waste from Anson and several surrounding counties and convert it to natural gas. They collect the natural gas and pump it right into the natural gas pipeline. That’s very exciting because they’re taking something that, at worst, was negative to the county, and turning it into a source of revenue. That particular process has we think that’s going to be a great logistics location for companies that are either looking to bring things in from the Port of Wilmington, or looking to service the Charlotte market from the periphery,” Marek shares. For any company looking to relocate to Anson County, as well as existing companies looking to expand, Marek says that in addition to many state-offered incentives, the county also has an attractive tax grant program in place. “We grant back a percentage of the new taxable investment that a company makes,” he notes. “The company pays the taxes either on their new facility or on an upgrade to an existing facility, and then, we grant them back 75 percent of those taxes for a period of either one, five, or six years, depending on a couple of factors, the largest one being the size of the investment.” In addition, most of the Town of Wadesboro is in a federal Opportunity Zone, so there are federal incentives connected to that program. Another recent development in Anson County