Ramsay Agriculture’s Ross Ramsay addresses Jamestown City Council (June 8, 2026)
Ramsay Agriculture plans to invest $120 million into three sites in the City of Jamestown as part of creating a vertical farming operation.
Ramsay Agriculture’s Ross Ramsay was joined by members of his teams to address Jamestown City Council members Monday night.
The project includes the renovation of the former Crawford-Atlas Furniture building at 40 Winsor Street, 65 River Street, and 1023 East Second Street.
Director for Policy Research at the Land Use Law Center and Director of U.S. Department of Energy’s New York/New Jersey Combined Heat and Power Technical Assistance Partnership Tom Bourgeois said the kind of Controlled Environmental Agriculture looking to be done in Jamestown has been done successfully in the Netherlands and elsewhere in the world.
He said this would be the first time a CEA project would be done in the United States, “So, if you design these systems where you’re providing local power, growing local food, creating local jobs, this is an environmentally superior project. It’s economically viable with a proven track record, and it’s also something that is really innovative, and in that sense, it’s attention-grabbing. This will shine the spotlight on Jamestown.”
Bourgeous said the proposal includes a quite sizable local generating energy station, which fits into New York State’s Climate Act that calls for decarbonization, “And it’s one that’s using waste, what would otherwise be discarded in landfills. So, you’re taking a waste product, whether it be food scraps, whether it be weeds from Chautauqua Lake, whether it be manure, and from that waste you’re creating food and power. So, once again, you’ve got waste heat and CO2 and you’re creating a bio-gas that’s generating power and running the high tech greenhouse and also there’s a potentially subsidiary investment in CO2.”
Bourgeous said there’s another kind of project that results in waste CO2 that is then being used in a bottling operation at a Coca-Cola plant in White Plains, New York.
Ramsay Agriculture Science Officer Larry Cosenza said when it comes to the three buildings of the project, the 1023 East Second Street location will be a pilot study for growing mushrooms. He said that location could have mushrooms delivered to the market in a couple of weeks with the possibility that there’s a storefront on the building as well. The 65 River Street building would be an expanded mushroom growing facility if the Second Street location is successful.
Cosenza said the 40 Winsor Street location, which has about five acres, will be the flagship building, “We can not only grow food there, but we can also take the organic community waste and start converting that into energy on the same site. And, you can see it has about four or five stories tall, and we believe we can put in, we have some systems, some hydroponic systems that are in there, they’re very unique. A lot of problems associated with indoor growing has been solved. One of the systems, the towers are about 40 feet tall. When we put them in there, we’ll produce about one one and a half million pounds of product.”
Cosenza said that they’d like to put a glass floor in so that people could tour the facility. He added that they also would like to put a store or farmers market at the street level to help serve the community, which is located in a food desert.
Ramsay Agriculture has already completed the stabilization of the 40 Winsor Street building at a cost of about $1 million.
The $120 million project is estimated to take two years to complete and would result in the hiring of 150 employees, not including employees as a result of construction.
Ross Ramsay said the project is currently in the process of raising capital with pre-commitment initial funding. He said they estimate it’ll be five months for the rest with the initial investment money going towards engineering. The company was approved in August 2025 a $250,000 loan at 4% interest for 10 years from the Jamestown Local Development Corporation for the stabilization of 40 Winsor Street.
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