Plans for Gigantic URI Greenhouse Complex Grow Slowly

"Controlled Environment Agriculture" has its detractors

By Frank Carini / ecoRI News staff

Nearly six years ago, when Gina Raimondo was still governor and David Dooley was the University of Rhode Island president, voters approved a green bond that included providing URI with $4 million to build greenhouses on prime agricultural land.

Michael Hallock, co-founder and CEO of the RI Mushroom Co., has partnered with Cambridge, Mass.-based American Ag Energy to build a greenhouse complex next to Peckham Farm in the village of West Kingston. They signed a lease Feb. 4, 2020, with URI for use of the property on state land south of Route 138. ecoRI News reached out to Hallock to talk about the project but our request didn’t receive a response.

URI, in conjunction with Rhode Island Agricultural Technologies LLC — a Delaware-based limited liability company consisting of the RI Mushroom Co. and American Ag Energy — will create the Rhode Island Agricultural Innovation & Entrepreneurship Campus, according to a Dec. 18, 2018, URI press release announcing the project.

Rhode Island Agricultural Technologies “shall be vested with legal title to certain property formerly owned by or under the control or in the custody of the Council on Postsecondary Education for the benefit of the University of Rhode Island,” according to the 109-page lease.

The lease also notes the tenant (Rhode Island Agricultural Technologies) “is the recipient of a Grant from the State of Rhode Island to create an agricultural technology campus.” URI is designated as the landlord. Components of the 59-acre campus include about 20 acres to grow vegetables, about 7.5 acres to grow mushrooms, about 5 acres for seed development, 1.5 acres for plant and fungus genomic research, and half an acre for an agriculture innovation center, according to the lease.

The “base rent” will be $2,000 an acre, for a total of $118,000 annually, according to a URI spokesperson. “This rent will not be due to URI until the project reaches specified milestones,” she added.

The 6-year-old press release notes the “project is anticipated to be situated on 50-plus acres adjacent to the URI Kingston Campus and also include more than 25 acres of greenhouses adjacent to a 15,000-plus square-foot Agriculture Innovation Center.”

This facility “will be the epicenter for agricultural innovation, entrepreneurism, internships, and education.” The release also claims “This project will secure Rhode Island’s position as the agricultural technology hub of the northeast.”

The Agricultural Innovation & Entrepreneurship Campus would be programmed and managed by URI, and would educate and train students “for the cutting-edge agricultural products, processes and jobs of the future.”

The project’s total cost has been estimated at about $115 million.

ecoRI News recently asked Dawn Bergantino, URI’s public information officer, about the project’s status. She noted “planning and permitting work for the project is well underway.” She said the $4 million “you inquired about has not yet been disbursed.”

“RIAT [Rhode Island Agriculture Technologies] is actively fundraising to secure the necessary resources for construction and operation,” Bergantino wrote in an email. “Private investment will cover most of the expected cost.”

She also wrote that the Fairgrounds Road project “will help to maximize local food production in a sustainable way and provide employment opportunities and positive economic impact to Rhode Island and the region.” She also noted “It will encourage modern agricultural approaches that augment the University’s long history of supporting agricultural advancement.”

Richard Rosen, the chief executive officer for American Ag Energy, told ecoRI News the hope is to break ground by the end of this year or early next, with construction finished sometime in 2024.

The project, though, does have its detractors. Michael Sullivan, a former URI professor of agronomy, is at the top. The former Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management director, who received his bachelor’s degree in plant and soil science from URI, has called the siting of the greenhouses and innovation center “ridiculous” and “offensive.”

“And here they want to drop this into the middle of the best soil we have in the state,” Sullivan told The Providence Journal last year.

In a recent email to ecoRI News, Sullivan, who earned a master’s degree in agronomy from the University of Vermont and a Ph.D. in agronomy from the University of Nebraska, wrote: “I don’t know that anything new is happening. My opinion hasn’t changed as to the absurdity of it.”

Another opponent of the project, who didn’t want to be identified, told ecoRI News he expected better from the state’s land-grant university. “This is an enterprise, not a teaching tool.”

This greenhouse project isn’t the first time Sullivan has expressed his frustration with URI development plans. In 2012 he spoke up against the use of 15 acres of farmland in the Flagg Road/Plains Road area to build a parking lot.

The building of the 330-vehicle parking lot and a new road began about a month before Rhode Island voters were asked to approve $20 million in bond money for Narragansett Bay restoration, open space protection, state park improvements and, farmland preservation.

“This is an exceptionally poor example of environmental advocacy,” he told ecoRI News in October of that year. “The state will soon be asking voters to fund $4.5 million for farmland preservation while a land-grant university is paving over 15 acres.

“We’re not just taking about some of the best topsoil in the region; we’re talking about some of the finest soil in the eastern United States. The idea that we needed to ruin this land is fundamentally appalling. Where is the sound thinking? The change in hydrology isn’t reversible. The change we’re making to the land isn’t reversible.”

The bond was passed and the parking lot built.

The URI site planned for greenhouses and the 15,000-square-foot Agricultural Innovation & Entrepreneurship Campus is currently a hayfield. Before that, the property was leased to a turf farmer. The property is within the White Horn Brook watershed, and abuts the West Kingston Elementary School.

Rosen said the project’s footprint would include 30 acres of facilities. He noted three crops — most likely salad greens, peppers, and strawberries — would be grown. He said plans currently are to stay away from tomatoes until the brown rugose fruit virus is better under control.

The West Kingston proposal is one of two industrial-scale greenhouse projects in which American Ag Energy is invested. The Massachusetts company partnered with North Country Growers to build a similar greenhouse operation in Berlin, N.H.

Rosen, who has a Ph.D. in engineering from Harvard University, emailed ecoRI News a video of the New Hampshire greenhouse in operation. He said such operations don’t produce stormwater runoff that washes nitrogen and other pollutants into nearby waterways or use herbicides or pesticides.

When completed, this slow-in-the-making URI project would serve as an example of industrial-scale controlled environment agriculture, according to its supporters. CEA is an advanced and intensive form of hydroponically based agriculture, where plants grow within a controlled system to optimize horticultural practices.

Proponents of this the type of closed-loop, indoor farming say it would help Rhode Island and the region, which is largely dependent on drought-prone and wildfire-threatened western states for much of its food, provide itself with a local supply of produce grown year-round under glass.

Rosen said when Raimondo was governor she told him she wanted 800 acres of CEA operations in Rhode Island.

Rhode Island Grows LLC is working to build a CEA greenhouse at Schartner Farms off South County Trail in Exeter. Those behind this massive indoor operation on farmland have said the system could yield 650,000 pounds of tomatoes per acre. They have said an expansion to 1,000 acres is a possibility.

Well-managed local CEA operations can provide fresh produce of “high quality and free of agriculture chemicals,” according to Cornell University.

Ken Ayars, chief of DEM’s agriculture division, told ecoRI News in 2021 that the state needs to embrace a blend of traditional farming and new technology to be successful.

“We have to recognize those opportunities are how we move forward to produce food,” Ayars said. He noted the state has a responsibility to seek food security through traditional farming practices and technologies enabling increased local production.

New England produces only 10% of its own food, with Rhode Island agriculture operations delivering less than 2% of the state’s supply — no surprise, since Rhode Island’s transition to suburbanization has cost the state some 80% of its farmland since 1945.

Opponents of CEAs, or least those built on top of farmland, however, believe the idea of incorporating 21st-century agricultural technology would work better combined with traditional farming practices, not instead of.

Cornell University notes CEA facilities can be located in urbanized and already-developed areas, “thus not requiring the conversion of open or agricultural land to greenhouses.”