The sign just to the right of the entrance reads, “This Establishment is a SMOKE-FREE Facility.”Yeah, right.Fling open the doors to Smith Farms Smoked Meats just off Interstate 65 in Cullman and you’re awash in an invisible cloud of sweet-smelling hickory smoke, the kind of smoke that stirs the memory and feeds the appetite.”Everything here is smoked,” said owner Rodger Turner with a laugh. “Everything I cook, and most anything else that’s just lying around here. I can go to the bank, and drop off the deposit bag, and before I know it, I’ll look through the drive-thru window and there’ll be three or four (tellers) back there smelling of the bank bag.”It’s been that way for five years now, ever since Turner, a butcher-turned-trucker-turned-entrepreneur, bought the famed smoked meats business from a relative of the same Smith family that started it as a roadside stand back in 1955.A Cullman native, Turner had never even stopped at the business seven miles outside town on Highway 278. But he knew enough about how popular their meats were with the local folks — and a growing national client base — that he jumped at the chance to buy the business.”The business was so far out of town it seemed like you had to drive for days just to get out there,” said Turner, “And the Smiths never advertised. They just kind of sat back, and people would come to them.” Customers would simply ring an old dinner bell beside the roadside stand, and Ed Smith, the man who started it all, would come out of his nearby house to greet them. They kept coming back, too.In fact, even before Turner bought the business, the Smiths’ hams had become legendary. “It’s a little different every time I hear it, but there’s this story I keep hearing about someone, usually it’s a doctor here in town, who went to Tennessee and bought a ham and when he got back home, he found out it was a Smith Farm ham. I’ve heard it I don’t know how many times. Most of the time, though, it was a doctor. Sometimes it’s Tennessee, sometimes Kentucky.”But it’s apparently no “rural myth” — Turner himself said he’s heard Melvin Smith, Ed’s son, tell about how his dad used to carry hams to Tennessee and sell them to stores up there.Keeping the Smith Farms name and the original recipes (but reducing some of the salt on the hams), Turner eventually moved into a new, 10,000-square-foot, $1 million building the day before Thanksgiving 2005. By Christmas, he’d sold 24,000 pounds — 12 tons — of ham. That’s in addition to 2,500 pounds of smoked bacon and 2,500 pounds of link sausage.”You wouldn’t believe it,” Turner said. “I had 17 people working, doing everything from packing gift boxes to stocking the shelves. About four times a week a FedEx truck would back up to the dock and load up the gift boxes we were shipping out. I did more in the month of December than I did all year long at the old place, and I look for it to double next year. And I didn’t even advertise the fact that we were moving because I didn’t think I was going to be able to handle it.” Now about 75 percent of customers come from the busy interstate — some looking to pick up the latest catalog of meats and specialty items, others looking for a meal. “People will walk in and say, ‘Man, this is like being on vacation up in the mountains,'” said Turner, referring to the country décor his wife Lori gave the store. “And I’ll probably have 15 to 20 cars a week to pull up out there, and people will walk in here asking, ‘Where’s the restaurant? Is it upstairs?”Though he’s toyed with the idea of serving breakfast to move some of the end cuts that don’t sell so well, there’s no restaurant inside Smith Farms. There are frozen vegetables, bags of fresh-ground corn meal and grits, a selection of almost 500 Amish food products, Priester’s Pecan products and a dizzying array of cheeses.But the meats are still king. There’s ham, pork tenderloin, sausage, baby back ribs, Boston butts, barbecue, turkey, turkey breasts and bacon — all cured and smoked to the Smith Farms standard.Guy Hall, director of the Alabama Farmers Federation’s Pork Division, says the Smith Farms story is further proof of consumer demand for pork’s versatility. “I think it’s great that Mr. Turner has been able to maintain a thriving business using pork, ‘The Other White Meat,'” said Hall. “Many meat retailers and restaurants rely on pork in their business plan because of its versatility and great taste.”Turner buys his hams by the ton directly from a Midwest packing house, and puts them on salt for 10 days before hand-rubbing them with a special blend of salt, sugar and other ingredients. After it’s treated, the meat stays in a cooler at 35 to 40 degrees for six weeks.After that, it’s into the smokers for 20 to 21 days at 85 degrees with a humidity of about 30 percent. “When I’d start smoking them at the old place, it would get so smoky in the store that customers would come in coughing,” Turner said. “Now, I’ve got a little better ventilation in here, but you can tell everything still smells like smoke. “Every time you walk in, you smell the smoke. And I’ve heard it a thousand times — ‘This reminds me of my granddad’s smokehouse!’ Older people were raised on these types of meat. The salt, the cured hams, the salt pork.”Of course, there’s a drawback to marketing on memories. Many customers don’t think of smoked meat until around November when the traditional “hog-killin’ weather” conjures memories of granddad’s smokehouse and grandma’s red-eye gravy and buttermilk biscuits the size of a cat’s head.”I’ve always wondered why that is,” said Turner. “Summertime out at the old place, I didn’t hardly do anything. Business was so slow! Then that first frost comes, and man, business just starts picking up — doubling. As long as it stayed cold. I never liked cold weather. I hated the cold. Now, I want it to be cold all the time ’cause it’s good for business.”Turner has recently started offering an aged prime rib steak that’ll make your local butcher envious. He hopes it’ll become as popular in the summertime as the smoked hams are in the winter.Turner says he’s spent so much time around the smokers that he’s almost become immune to the aroma. “The only time I can really smell it now is after I bring them out of the smoker and put them in the cooler,” he said. “My wife’s gotten used to it now. Used to she’d make me take off my clothes at the door. The smell just sort of sticks with you.”When I first bought the business, I was working late smoking hams, and I came in one night and went to bed. My wife was up doing some pickling, and when she came to bed, she smelled just like that vinegar. I told her the next morning, ‘You smelled just like a pickle when you got in bed. It woke me up!’ And she said, ‘Well, you smell just like a ham!’ I told her she’s just going to have to get used to that smoked smell. That smell is money.”