A celebrated startup promised Kentuckians green jobs. It gave them a 'grueling hell on earth.'
Article is from last November.
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The workers had spent the morning of November 8, 2021, clipping, trussing, and trellising hundreds of thousands of tomato plants that twisted almost four stories into the air. They were inside one of the world’s largest high-tech greenhouses, which sits on more than 60 acres of a former cattle field in Morehead, Kentucky.
As one of the greenhouse workers, whom I’ll call Nora, sat down for lunch in the worker canteen, she heard her colleagues whisper about their new task for the day. U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell would be visiting that afternoon to give a speech praising the greenhouse company, AppHarvest. Before he arrived, management had to make sure their Spanish-speaking colleagues disappeared.
“We had very little time,” recalled Nora, whose real name is being withheld because she is subject to a nondisclosure agreement. “We had to get them off the premises and away before he got there.”
Nora watched her coworkers get dismissed, grab their stuff, and leave on white buses bound for a trio of small motels where the largely Mexican contract workers lived four or five to a room. When McConnell arrived, Nora joined her remaining, mostly white colleagues on the sunny lawn. Their clean T-shirts advertised AppHarvest’s name and logo, intended to invoke both the Appalachian region where they worked and the iconic branding of Apple — Silicon Valley by way of the Middle American upstart.
We all know the decline of the coal industry only got worse, and so this [AppHarvest] gives us hope,” the senator said, praising the local labor force encircling him. “You are the real leaders, I think, in beginning to fully develop all of Kentucky’s potential.”
It was a familiar message, one that had been touted over and over in nationally televised interviews, public filings, and company reports by AppHarvest’s then-CEO, a Kentucky native and entrepreneur named Jonathan Webb. In 2018, the 32-year-old Webb returned home with the promise of building a dozen high-tech, hydroponic indoor farms across Eastern Kentucky and the surrounding region, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, berries, and lettuce. Not only would he be piloting an advanced form of climate-resilient agriculture, he would also be generating gainful, blue-collar employment in some of the country’s most economically distressed counties, where he argued that the coal industry’s downfall left a void that could be filled by sustainable industry.
Continued
https://grist.org/agriculture/appharvest-indoor-farming-morehead-kentucky/
= new reply since forum marked as read
I am sad for the former employees who gave their all and lost so much.
The phrase "fools rush in . . . " comes to mind about the founder of this enterprise.
Thanks for sharing, my dear Diamond_Dog! Even though it's not right up-to-the-minute, it's still important.
