Revised Calverton cannabis greenhouse returns to Riverhead Planning Board

The proposed Brother Bear Canna greenhouse in Calverton returned to the Riverhead Planning Board on May 22 with a smaller footprint, grass-and-dirt parking and no immediate action from the board, but the fight over whether it belongs in farmland is far from settled.

Brother Bear Canna, LLC cut the greenhouse to about 31,000 square feet and removed paved parking in an effort to avoid the variances that the Riverhead Zoning Board of Appeals denied on Jan. 8. Those earlier requests involved an eight-foot woven-wire deer fence where town code allows six feet, and impervious coverage of 24.04 percent in a zone where 15 percent is permitted.

The site at 1458 Middle Road is a 5.3-acre parcel in Riverhead’s Agricultural Protection Zone, near Windcrest East and Foxwood Village, two over-55 communities, as well as single-family homes and a town-owned open-space parcel. Riverhead planning staff have said cannabis cultivated under a state license is treated as an agricultural crop under state law, which is why the project was advanced as a greenhouse application in the first place.

Opponents have pushed back on that framing since the project first surfaced. The Calverton Civic 1458 Committee argued in a Dec. 11 letter that the proposal looked less like a conventional greenhouse and more like an industrial controlled-environment operation, with a nearly 34,000-square-foot metal structure, 24/7 operations, large-scale HVAC systems, artificial LED lighting and possible drying, curing, trimming, packaging and extraction work.

Residents who packed Town Hall for earlier hearings pressed officials and the applicant’s attorney on odor control, traffic, noise and the project’s classification under the Riverhead Town Code. The revised plan discussed last week focused on site design rather than those quality-of-life concerns, and a slope analysis may still leave the project above the 15 percent impervious-surface cap once buildable areas are recalculated.

The zoning dispute has also unfolded against a shifting legal backdrop. On July 23, 2025, a Suffolk County Supreme Court decision in Tink & E. Co., Inc. v. Town of Riverhead found certain Riverhead cannabis zoning provisions preempted by state law. Riverhead, Southampton and Brookhaven sued the state in February over cannabis zoning preemption, a case that could shape how towns regulate future projects on farmland.

For now, the Calverton greenhouse sits at the center of a larger Suffolk County question: whether cannabis cultivation will be treated as farming, or whether it will be allowed to bring industrial-scale development to rural neighborhoods under the cover of agriculture.