As a native of Youngstown, Ohio, and a former All-Pro quarterback of the Cleveland Browns, Bernie Kosar is no stranger to blue-collar communities .
"All of my family worked either in the steel mills or the coal mines,” said Kosar, who still calls the Cleveland area home. “Those are the two options when you grew up in Youngstown in the ’60s and ’70s."
On Wednesday, Kosar was in Pikeville, Kentucky, at the Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR) Summit for the announcement from Gov. Andy Beshear and U.S. Rep. Harold “Hall” Rogers that Kosar's recently formed nonprofit organization, Community at the Core, would be receiving $6.6 million to build a cold storage facility for apple production in Martin County.
About two years ago, a group of friends from Eastern Kentucky convinced Kosar to check out the West Virginia National Guard’s Patriot Guardens, where abandoned mine sites were being transformed into thriving apple orchards. Kosar was immediately fascinated by the environmental science involved that was spearheaded by Gen. Maj. James Hoyer.
"I give him a lot of credit for being a pioneer and a visionary in trying to find a creative way to help out the people within West Virginia and within the Appalachian region,” Kosar said of Hoyer.
Kosar’s initiative is one of 11 economic development projects in nine Eastern Kentucky counties as part of the Abandoned Mine Lands Economic Revitalization (AMLER) program that are receiving a total of $24.4 million in state funding.
AMLER is expected to generate or retain more than 200 jobs, provide training for 300 people and serve more than 100,000 people through a combination of tourism, infrastructure development and training opportunities.
The plan for the cold storage facility will cost approximately $15 million, which looks take an existing 40,000-square-foot facility in the Eastern Kentucky Business Park and build on an additional 20,000 square feet. When all of the necessary equipment is in place, the facility should be able to process 120,000 bins of apples a year to be distributed to grocery stores.
Before the announcement, Kosar and his team of nine other investors had already invested $8 million in private contributions.
In addition to building the cold storage faculty, Community at the Core — based out of Eastern Kentucky — is also in discussions with the USDA and area universities to create educational programming to help teach local communities on best practices for growing apples and inspire possible agriculture entrepreneurs. Those outreach and training opportunities will take place at AppleAtcha AgriTech in Inez, Kentucky, located near the cold storage facility and being privately funded by Kosar and his investment group.
“[We’re talking] about the opportunities that we have here in Eastern Kentucky, and how we're able to bring back and revitalize the economic development by repurposing these coal mines,” Kosar said about his time spent at SOAR.
Kosar and his team have started planting apple trees in two newly established orchards. The first is AppleAtcha, where they initially planted 120,000 apple trees in June 2021. It should be fully planted in approximately two years. The second is in Clay County, West Virginia, where they will begin prepping the land on the orchard next year.
Community at the Core currently consists of 12 volunteers, but the organization hopes to be able to create more than 50 full-time jobs at the cold storage facility — with an additional 40 full-time jobs at the orchard in Kentucky and another 400 in the West Virginia orchard.
The organization is also working to form a partnership with Operation UNITE, a fellow nonprofit launched by Rogers in 2003 to offer drug and narcotic treatment and recovery services in Eastern Kentucky. The partnership — and possibly others with additional organizations — would create a pathway for workers to re-enter the workforce.
