A lettuce growing company that moved into Carbon County two years ago has plans for further expansion.

Representatives from Little Leaf Farms, which started in Deven, Massachusetts, presented its expansion plans to the Carbon County Planning Commission on Tuesday.

In 2020, Little Leaf was approved to construct three agricultural greenhouse facilities on 76 acres of land in CAN Do Inc., McAdoo Industrial Park, Banks Township.

Tim Cunniff, co-founder of Little Leaf Farms, said that the company, which is the number 1 greenhouse grown lettuce in the country, is seeing growth and is expanding into local markets.

“We are happy to report that Little Leaf Farms has been doing a lot of hard work to invest a lot of money in this area,” Cunniff said, noting that the business currently ships 50,000 pounds of lettuce a week and will be expanding to 100,000 pounds in the coming weeks.

He said the company has hired approximately 110 people.

Because of this need, the company is in the process of purchasing an additional 110 acres to construct additional greenhouses and retention ponds to supply water for the production.

Little Leaf has been in business since 2015 and expanded from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania over the last two years, working on the construction of phase 1 of the project.

In phase 2, which is why the company came before the planning commission, it calls for constructing four new multi-building agricultural campuses with a total of 2,482,062 square feet of building space and just over 500,000 square fee of building support areas.

William C. Letwinsky, president of Design BLD, said that once both phases are complete, it will include six greenhouses for lettuce production, as well as on-site watering systems using rainwater and water runoff rather than city water.

Cunniff said that this new phase will help complete the Pennsylvania campus for Little Leaf and future plans include expanding down into North Carolina to also supply that corridor.

Ivan O. Meixell Jr., county planner, outlined his findings of the plans, which outlined some areas that need to be met before final plan approval could be recommended.

This included letters from the township and Carbon County Conversation District, as well as development agreements and lighting.

The commission then recommended conditional plan approval. This recommendation will be sent to Banks Township for inclusion as the plans move forward.

In 2020, Little Leaf received a $3 million grant through the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program for the approximate $100 million project.

It received a second $1.45 million grant through the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program in 2021.