Subcontractor sues for $8M in unpaid work on Plenty indoor farm project in Chesterfield

Plenty Unlimited’s indoor farm in Meadowville Technology Park. (Jack Jacobs photo)

Shortly after California-based Plenty Unlimited sowed the first strawberries at its new indoor farm in Chesterfield, a legal battle has sprouted up over the facility’s construction process.

Mechanicsville subcontractor Electrical Controls & Maintenance filed a lawsuit earlier this month seeking nearly $8 million it says it is owed for work on the indoor growing facility in Meadowville Technology Park.

ECM, according to its attorney Tom Wolf of law firm O’Hagan Meyer, has stopped working on the project and has asked a judge to order the sale of the property to drum up proceeds for what it claims it’s owed.

Plenty, as well as its landlord, California-based Realty Income Properties, are listed as a defendants in the lawsuit. Also named as a defendant is the farming facility’s general contractor Whiting-Turner, which ECM claims is in breach of contract.

ECM was tapped by Whiting-Turner in August 2023 to handle electrical work for new grow rooms planned as part of the latest phase at the facility at 13500 N. Enon Church Road, where the first strawberries for commercial distribution were recently planted. That phase of construction is referred to in the legal filing as the Plenty Farm 2 project.

ECM claims in the Jan. 10 complaint that it is owed $7.7 million, with interest, for work completed from August to November 2024. It claims it has “repeatedly” submitted invoices seeking payment to no avail, per the filing made in Chesterfield Circuit Court.

The defendants hadn’t filed responses in the lawsuit as of Tuesday morning. Realty Income and Plenty didn’t respond to inquiries from BizSense seeking comment.

The Plenty facility seemed to be operational Tuesday morning, though there didn’t appear to be any active construction taking place at the site by that time.

ECM is seeking a judgment to enforce a mechanic’s lien on the 22-acre property and is just one of several firms involved in work on the facility that have filed liens on the property. Whiting-Turner claims it is owed nearly $13 million for its work on the expansion. Montpelier-based C.T. Purcell Excavating, Glen Allen-based Century Construction Co., ColonialWebb in Henrico, Chester-based New Market Asphalt Corp. and Liphart Steel in Richmond have also in the last several months made lien filings stating they’re owed money for work on the property, according to court records. Only ECM had filed a full-on lawsuit as of Tuesday morning.

Matt Lohr, Virginia’s secretary of agriculture and forestry, addresses the crowd during the summer 2023 groundbreaking ceremony for the Plenty indoor farm. (BizSense file)

When the Plenty project was announced in September 2022, the West Coast startup laid out a vision for a $300 million, multi-facility campus on up to 120 acres at Meadowville. Plenty has said the campus would grow 20 million pounds of produce annually and employ 300 people at full buildout.

Plenty opened the first, and so far only, indoor farm on the campus in the fall, following a groundbreaking for the project in summer 2023. The company described it as a 100,000-square-foot facility with 40,000 square feet of growing space ahead of the sowing of the first strawberry crop late last year. The farm was designed to use 30-foot-tall, indoor towers to grow strawberries, and have the ability to control light, temperature and humidity through proprietary software.

ECM worked on the project’s initial phase in addition to the second phase, the latter of which kicked off in November 2023.

Plenty said in a LinkedIn post in December 2024 it had planted its first strawberries slated for commercial distribution at the local facility, which it calls Plenty Richmond Farm, earlier in the month, and that the company planned to have its first harvest in early 2025.

In that social media post, Plenty announced it was shutting down an indoor farming facility in Compton, California, that grew leafy greens. The company said that the “rising cost” of operating in California, including energy prices, was a factor, as was a desire to focus its attention on growing strawberries.

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