Pegasus Agriculture Group announced support a major public-private initiative to develop a global indoor agriculture production, research, training, and service hub in the Kennett Square area.
The indoor agriculture company is based in Dubai.
Plans for the hub initiative are were publicly announced for the first time this week at Indoor Ag Con Asia in Singapore, by Kennett Township, the historic center of the indoor mushroom industry in the U.S.
.The initiative was developed by Kennett’s Sustainable Development Office (SDO) with support from Kennett area growers and packers, regional economic development agencies, and regional agriculture, engineering, and business schools, a release stated.
According to Mahmood Almas, Pegasus’ founder and chairman, “Kennett’s initiative to develop a world-class indoor agriculture hub is not only visionary but eminently practical. That’s because Kennett, unlike most other areas, can leverage the extensive infrastructure of its historic indoor agriculture industry. That makes all the difference to Pegasus.”
Michael Guttman, who directs the initiative for Kennett, stated that “Kennett currently produces 50 percent of the annual US mushroom crop – some 500 million pounds of produce – all grown indoors year-round and delivered fresh every day with 48 hours of picking all across North America. We’ve already developed an extensive infrastructure to accomplish this that includes engineering, construction, maintenance, public utilities, cold storage, logistics, transportation, and of course a very experienced workforce. That infrastructure is largely crop-agnostic, so it can just as readily serve the needs of a ‘green’ indoor agricultural firm such as Pegasus, giving them a fast and easy way to enter the vast US marketplace we already serve at the lowest possible cost and risk.”
“Kennett’s extensive infrastructure alone makes it an extremely attractive location for us,” Almas said. “But that’s only one facet of this initiative. Kennett is also working with some its world-class regional agriculture, engineering and business schools to develop a joint indoor agriculture research, training, and innovation incubator center in Kennett, designed to work closely with private production firms located in the area. This center, the first of its kind in a major production area, will be a major asset to the rapidly evolving indoor agriculture industry.”
“We very much appreciate the active and public support of Kennett’s initiative by Pegasus, a highly respected global leader in indoor agriculture,” said Guttman. “In particular, we appreciate how our initiative ties in with Pegasus’s global vision of creating a worldwide network of environmentally and economically sustainable indoor agriculture communities to ensure food security. Working with Pegasus and our other partners, our initiative can hopefully serve as a blueprint for developing a network of similar indoor agriculture hubs all around the world.”
