Dublin Farms eyes future growth with new potato packing shed
Dublin Farms eyes future growth with new potato packing shed
Dublin Farms, Horntown, VA, is firmly rooted to its past, tracing its origin to a 300-acre family farm that has grown potatoes every season since 1886.
Mark Hickman, operations manager, represents the fifth generation at Dublin Farms, which grows in a 20-mile radius in the northeast corner of Accomack County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Hickman, his brother Matt and cousin Phillip run the farm. Mark’s father, David Hickman, still has an active role in the management of the farm and focuses on sales during the harvest season.
While honoring its past, Dublin Farms is preparing for the future, and broke ground on a 28,000-square-foot packing shed in December 2024. The original 15,000-square-foot facility, built by Mark Hickman’s grandfather and great-grandfather in the 1950s, and expanded to accommodate updated equipment over the years, will be used for storage.
Mark Hickman said several issues necessitated the new construction. While the business focuses on 2,000-pound totes sent to repackers in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, more of these customers are requesting consumer packs now.
“There’s a lot of demand for consumer packs now, and that’s from COVID, and really hasn’t died off like we thought it would,” he said. “Which is not a bad thing.”
A new consumer pack line has been installed in the facility, which is about 75 percent complete. A new wash line will also be added. That equipment would not have fit in the former shed, a cinder block building that wasn’t fully enclosed and had exposed rafters — which is a food safety concern, he said.
The older facility could pack about 50,000 pounds of potatoes an hour, if they were of excellent quality.
“This new line should be able to run at an average of 60,000 pounds, and then we should be able to ramp up to about 80,000 pounds an hour once it’s fully commissioned,” Hickman said.
Another underlying reason for the upgrade is the increasing difficulty in attracting labor and the need for increased automation to compensate. The former pack line needed 45 workers to run at capacity, and its replacement needs about 35 workers.
The new facility has room to expand with more automation in the future.
“The end goal here is once everything's up and running and we see that we can do, because we've got a six-week window right now, and 500 acres is what we can pack in six weeks,” Hickman said. “We'd like to get that up to around 600 acres and we think that'd be doable with this new line.”
Dublin Farms has used domestic labor from a crew that starts in Florida and works up the coast as production shifts north.
“We had a great relationship with the crew leader, who would organize it and bring the guys up, but he was getting older and it was harder and harder to find the people to do the work,” Hickman said.
Last season, Dublin Farms used the H-2A temporary visa program for the first time, with three employees. Hickman said he was impressed with the results and the farm is using H-2A for all 45 seasonal hires this year.
