A major grain terminal planned for the banks of the Mississippi River in Louisiana has been canceled. Greenfield Louisiana’s plans for an $800 million grain-export facility in Wallace has been met with pushback from advocates who don’t want to see more of what they call polluting industry in the corridor known as “cancer alley.”
Greenfield, which specializes in “agricultural infrastructure,” has faced a series of delays over the past several years, due to legal filings and community protests lodged by a group of residents in St. John the Baptist Parish.
Led by a local nonprofit, The Descendants Project, residents had argued that the massive terminal — with an elevator nearly the height of the Superdome, set onto a 1,300-acre plot of sugarcane fields — was certain to ruin the rural community.
In a statement, the company said it got word last week that its plans would be set back even further, as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers delayed the permitting process for the grain terminal by an additional six months.
In response, Greenfield scrapped its plans for the facility.
“Time kills all projects, and, sadly, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chose to repeatedly delay this project by catering to these special-interest groups when it should have been listening to local voices from our community,” said Lynda Van Davis, counsel and head of external affairs for Greenfield.
Gov. Jeff Landry blamed the Army Corps’ delay on “special interest groups and wealthy plantation owners,” presumably referring to advocates from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, and a group of plantations that would have been disrupted by the construction and operation of the grain terminal.
In May, the National Park Service published a draft of its findings that the 11-mile stretch of River Road along the rural West Bank of the parish is a good candidate for preservation as a National Historic Landmark District.
Also, the terminal was opposed by three plantations in the area, Whitney, Evergreen and Oak Alley, all of which offer nationally significant interpretations of slavery.
The governor also may have been referring to twin sisters Jo and Joy Banner, two natives of Wallace who founded The Descendants Project in 2020 before Greenfield had announced its plans. The Banner sisters have been at the forefront of the Greenfield fight. Earlier this year, The Descendants Project purchased the nearby Woodland Plantation, the starting point of one of the largest slave revolts in U.S. history, putting it under Black ownership for the first time.
A community divided
The announcement came by surprise this month. Residents of St. John had gathered at the Morning Star Church in Wallace. Neighbors thought that they were there to give input and to hear an update from Greenfield after the Army Corps had announced its latest permitting timeline — the fifth delay over the last 18 months by the Corps.
But there was nothing to discuss, the project was canceled.
Nicole Dumas, a Wallace resident who attended the meeting, was devastated to hear Greenfield announce the project’s halt. She said the prolonged delay from the Army Corps felt like a slap in the face that denied the community the economic and job growth that they had hoped the grain terminal would bring.
Greenfield representatives have contended that similar projects in the region have been approved in just six months.
In the wake of Greenfield’s announcement to abandon its plans, Jo Banner said that she felt sad for her neighbors who had supported the terminal, most of them in the belief that the enterprise would add jobs to the parish’s economy.
Banner was also taken aback by the way Landry and Greenfield placed blame on “special interest groups – many of which are out-of-state NGOs.” She emphasized that The Descendants Project was decidedly in the interest of St. John residents and a very local nonprofit.
The next steps for St. John
In April, St. John the Baptist Parish Council had voted to rezone the Greenfield site, nearly 1,300 acres of land, from residential to heavy industrial use.
Though the parish Code of Ordinances include protections for its residents — such as a 2,000-foot separation that heavy industry must maintain from areas of more dense residential development — the Parish Council accepted a new interpretation for those protections that sets aside density calculations based on U.S. Census data.
Under the new interpretation, the entire parish is at risk of industrial encroachment, The Descendants Project argued in legal filings.
Now, even though Greenfield has halted its plans for a grain terminal, those interpretations still stand, leaving the door open for what The Descendants Project believes are miscalculations of residential density. Under the parish’s math, any other industrial company could build a facility for heavy industrial use in Wallace or another St. John community — without the 2,000-foot separation requirement.
But for now, those in Wallace who opposed the terminal feel a weight has been lifted from their shoulders, Jo Banner said. Longtime residents had a litany of concerns that ranged from a loss of history to health hazards.
Part of an ongoing battle
Last year, the Army Corps of Engineers found that the Greenfield Grain Terminal could harm historic places in St. John, including the Willow Grove Cemetery, a small community-run cemetery in Wallace.
Yet, even beyond the destruction of historic sites, residents worried that the 250-foot grain elevator would have blocked the sun from reaching their homes until the afternoon. They had also complained to the parish council about air-quality issues and dust.
Greenfield argued that technological advances in recent decades meant that far less grain dust would be released. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality had issued Greenfield a ‘minor source’ air permit in August 2020, Van Davis noted. “The very same environmental impact as a hospital,” she said.
It’s not the first battle fought by the community. Advocates have spent years trying to stop a giant Taiwanese plastic company, Formosa Plastics, from building a large petrochemical plastic-manufacturing plant.
Formosa opted not to build in St. John, but has now set its sights on land within the historically Black community of Welcome in St. James Parish.
Some who led the fight against Formosa in the 1990s have now passed away. One of the most prominent activists of that era, Wilfred Greene, is buried in the cemetery at the end of West 5th Street.
To Banner, it was no coincidence that Greenfield announced the end of the grain terminal project just one street from the cemetery. “I really felt an ancestor shining down on us yesterday,” she said.
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri. Sign up to republish stories like this one for free.
