Agribusiness

Attorneys in Ward and Smith’s Agribusiness Practice Group have the knowledge and experience in agribusiness law to provide high-quality legal representation to a wide variety of agribusinesses in North and South Carolina and across the United States.

We represent clients ranging from small farm and horticultural operations to livestock, poultry, and vegetable producers and processors, to timber operations and crop storage facilities, to equipment and inputs suppliers, to agritourism ventures and industrial hemp and CBD operations.

Our attorneys strive to gain a thorough understanding of our clients’ businesses, needs, and goals in order to provide exceptional client service.  They know that a client’s needs do not necessarily arise during the normal business day, so they make themselves available at work or at home, in or out of the office, whenever a legal question or concern arises.

Areas of Representation

The Agribusiness Practice Group understands the challenges facing our clients and can offer the guidance clients need to protect their current positions and build for the future.  Attorneys in this Practice Group advise clients in the following matters:

• Formation, merger, acquisition, dissolution, and succession planning for farming corporations, family partnerships, and other agribusiness entities
• Tax advice, including representation in proceedings before the U.S. Tax Court
• Farmland leases, partition disputes, cartway and boundary line disputes, and farm rent disputes
• Bona fide farm designations and present-use-value tax programs
• Crop insurance
• Equipment financing and leasing
• Environmental compliance, including water quality for animal operations, enforcement defense, odor control, groundwater pollution, and PFAS-related matters
• Regulatory compliance and permitting involving USDA, state agencies, and local government
• Interpretation and application of the Farm Bill and government payment programs
• Right to Farm Act issues and nuisance defense
• Agritourism liability and compliance
• Intellectual property matters, including copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret
• Distributor/grower and related agreements
• Hemp and cannabis law, including federal, state, and local regulatory compliance
• Employee discrimination, harassment, wage and hour, and other employment-related claims
• Real estate transactions
• Estate planning, including long-term care asset protection
• Structuring loan transactions and assessing issues that arise during the borrower/lender relationship
• Natural disaster preparedness and recovery
• Litigation across all NC and SC trial and appellate courts and federal courts spanning several jurisdictions

Litigation Experience

Members of this Practice Group also have significant agribusiness litigation experience. They appear in all of the trial and appellate courts in North and South Carolina and in the federal trial and appellate courts spanning several jurisdictions. In a widely reported North Carolina Supreme Court decision, Craig v. Chatham County, our attorneys successfully represented a local pork producer seeking to set aside county ordinances that, if found valid, would have significantly and negatively impacted the operation and growth of the client’s agribusiness.

In addition, the attorneys in this Practice Group are also members of numerous legal and agribusiness organizations.  Many are members of the American and North Carolina Bar Associations; three are members of the American Bar Association and North Carolina Bar Association Intellectual Property Law Sections; two are members of the North Carolina Bar Association Environment, Energy & Natural Resources Law Section; and one is a member of the American, North Carolina, and Virginia Angus Associations.