“You look at all these tech billionaires looking to leave the planet and go to Mars, but water is the one thing Planet Earth has that nowhere else in the known universe has,” Webb says, talking quickly. “When water becomes the price of oil, that’s thatKentucky is also optimal because the location cuts down on shipping distances, AppHarvest says. Seventy percent of the U.S. is within a day’s drive of Kentucky, reducing transportation emissions by 80 percent.
AppHarvest’s baseline carbon footprint has not yet been determined since operations began in October 2020. They say they are waiting to have a year’s worth of data and expect to include it in their 2021 sustainability report. The result, Webb hopes, could be not only a more sustainable system but a model for other greenhouses globally. After AppHarvest went public, he says he began getting calls from foreign dignitaries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
Employees at AppHarvest make a “living wage” which drills down to roughly $13/hour for entry level employees , along with “whole family” benefit packages including health, dental, vision, and life insurance, with 100 percent of premiums paid for all family members, a 401K match program, shares in the publicly traded company, and monthly CSA boxes. AppHarvest estimates an entry-level worker earns 71 percent of Rowan County’s household median income.
When he talks about why he started AppHarvest in Kentucky, Webb leans heavily into his ties to Appalachia. His grandmother, he says, was born in eastern Kentucky, and grew up in a home with a dirt floor; her father died in a coal mining accident when she was three years old. Webb’s own father grew up in a children’s home until he was 12, and neither of his parents have college degrees. His sister, who married a man from Pike County, Kentucky’s easternmost point, works as a state social worker.
But not everybody sees a bright shiny future in Webb’s vision. As agri-tech takes hold in Kentucky, it could complicate the prioritization of small, organic farmers caretaking the land, water, soil, and local economies, says Richards of the Community Farm Alliance . “AppHarvest isn’t farming. It’s industrial food production,” he says. “When you’re farming, it’s about a relationship with a piece of land and good stewardship.
“It is a bit of a slap in the face for those of us who’ve been doing this work for a long time to see that work ultimately go to this for-profit and their shareholders who aren’t even in Kentucky,” Richards says.
They call it harnessing Nature! 'Kentucky Fried Chicken move'..