Owners of one of Chester County’s biggest mushroom growers have proposed the local industry’s biggest expansion in recent years, despite the fact that the industry that has been struggling with expensive antitrust litigation, foreign competition and labor shortages .
South Mill Champs, one of North America’s largest growers, plans a $115 million complex, with nearly one million square feet of growing space, on a 134-acre hay farm in Elk Township.
Last week, the state approved a $1.5 million grant to extend a natural gas pipeline to the proposed mushroom farm site and a handful of nearby retail businesses. The site, which will employ 500, is big enough to locate the full range of spawn, growing, processing, packaging, and trucking on one site, said MaryFrances McGarrity, senior vice president of the Chester County Economic Development Council, the agency that applied for the state grant on behalf of the company.
Pressed for space, growers have expanded out of state, said Gary Smith, the council’s president. For example, Kennett Square-based Phillips Mushrooms’ 2013 expansion to Warwick, Md. “There have been a lot of acquisitions and consolidations of small family farmers. We think this will be the most automated, highly efficient” growing operation in North America.
South Mill Champs was formed by Eos, the New York investment company that bought control of the Pia family’s South Mill mushroom houses in Kennett Square two years ago and combined it with British Columbia, Canada-based Champs mushroom farms.
Source: inquirer.com
