Get the latest tech news
How AppHarvest’s indoor farming scheme imploded (2023)
The inside story of how AppHarvest’s indoor farming scheme imploded — and took its blue-collar workforce down with it.
When McConnell arrived, Nora joined her remaining, mostly-white colleagues on the sunny lawn, their clean t-shirts advertising 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. It also convinced a number of big names to join the company’s board: Martha Stewart, activist investor Jeffrey Ubben, former Impossible Foods CFO David Lee, and JD Vance, the venture capitalist and Hillbilly Elegy author who would later win election to a U.S. senate seat in Ohio with a Trump-inspired, anti-immigrant message. State documents obtained through open records requests, including complaints to Kentucky’s Occupational Safety and Health Committee, as well as interviews with 12 former employees in both the flagship Morehead greenhouse and corporate office, reveal issues widespread across AppHarvest operations, exposing how unsafe working conditions, negligible training that failed to prepare workers for their job requirements, and an unprofessional workplace doomed the company nearly from the start.
Or read this on Hacker News