North Country Growers, the Boston-based company that has proposed building two giant greenhouses on land that it would buy from the city of Berlin, has been given until march 31 to close on that purchase. The Berlin industrial development and park authority voted to grant the extension.
Richard Rosen, the CEO of American Ag Energy, which is the parent company of North Country Growers, said the plan for the greenhouses continues to move forward. The plan calls for NCG building two 10-acre hydroponic greenhouses that would produce salad greens and tomatoes. The greenhouses would produce 15 million salad units and eight million pounds of tomatoes per year while employing up to 80 people. The greenhouses would be heated by waste heat and carbon dioxide from the production of electricity by generators using natural gas from a nearby Liberty Utility pipeline.
“We still have our plans and we think we’re moving forward pretty much on schedule now,” Rosen said. “We’d like to start construction this spring and within nine to twelve months we would begin producing.” Rosen said NCG would like to eventually build a second 20-acre greenhouse facility, possibly also in Berlin.
Mayor Paul Grenier said that he is cautiously optimistic that a purchase-and-sale with NCG that will be executed simultaneously to a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement between the company and the city.
“There’s been more activity in the last 10 days than probably in the last five months,” said Grenier, in terms of the city’s communication with NCG, all of which bodes well for a positive outcome.
Grenier said the pilot agreement is being “word-smithed.”
The mayor confirmed that a second proposal to build a major greenhouse facility in Berlin, while also delayed, is moving forward, too.
Last year, Burgess BioPower announced that it was clearing space on its property for a 190,000-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse that would be heated by the warm wastewater from its 75-megawatt biomass power plant. Grenier said that project, which would produce leafy greens, is about 60 days behind schedule in the filing of a site plan application with the city’s Planning Board.