Nancy Hatfield was working the night shift as an assistant manager at a 24-hour Shell gas station in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, when she learned that the new indoor farm—just 20 minutes away in Morehead—was hiring.
Hatfield, who is 27 and has two young daughters, says before her eldest started school, the late hours weren’t so bad. Her husband would take care of the kids at night, and she would spend the day with them before heading back to her job at 5 p.m.
“It was great,” she told me. “Then Madeline started school, and I was like, ‘If I’m at work all night and she’s at school all day, I’m never going to see her.’ And that didn’t sit well with me, so I went on the hunt for a different job.”
Now, Hatfield spends evenings with her family and days helping take meticulous care of hundreds of thousands of tomato plants in a glass-roofed greenhouse the size of 50 football fields. She started working for AppHarvest—a company she says many in the community had their eyes on—shortly after it went into production in March 2021, right before the first harvest of hydroponic tomatoes.
Appharvest’s Morehead, Kentucky, facility.
Hatfield is one of around 500 AppHarvest employees from Morehead and other nearby towns in this region of Appalachian Kentucky, a small army of plant tenders called “crop care specialists” who show up every day in brightly colored T-shirts. The jobs—which start at $13 an hour and provide health insurance and productivity bonuses—have been popular in a region where the average household income is 40 percent less than the national average, and living-wage jobs have been scarce in recent years.
For Hatfield, it was a step up. “There hadn’t been anything similar in the Morehead area,” she told me. “A lot of people either work in fast food, education, or in the medical industry. So, this gives people an option in the agriculture field, without having a degree.”
Hatfield is also missing a hand, so her job options have been limited. And yet, when we spoke, she described with enthusiasm the way she one-handedly removes suckers from the tomato plants—which can grow as tall as 40 feet under a combination of natural light, LEDs, and high-pressure sodium lights—to ensure that the plants’ energy goes into creating trusses, or clusters of tomatoes. Hatfield hopes it leads to more opportunities with the company. But for now, she says, she likes caring for the plants much better than overseeing a convenience store.
The other AppHarvest workers I met at the Morehead facility—a sleek, 3 million-square-foot building made up of several conjoined Dutch-style greenhouses surrounded by picturesque rolling hills—echoed Hatfield’s experiences. And it’s not hard to see why the whole operation has inspired a combination of awe and optimism for both residents and visitors.
Inside the temperate greenhouse, long rows of plants—720,000 in total growing in small cakes of substrate—flank a center walkway, and the light, when it filters through the glass roof, is refracted, diffusing and softening the shadows. A 44 million-gallon retention pond lies alongside the far end of the building, collecting rainwater and cycling it through to the plants and back out again in a closed loop.
And while it’s one of a handful of high-tech indoor farming operations that have garnered glowing media attention and massive venture capital investments in recent years, the majority of the others have built locations in urban areas first and then begun to add more rural, less coastal locations. Take Aerofarms’ indoor warehouse operation in Danville, Virginia (population 42,000), or Bright Farms’ greenhouse in Wilmington, Ohio (population 12,000), for example.
AppHarvest, on the other hand, has been rooted to rural Kentucky from the start. CEO and founder Jonathan Webb grew up in the state and returned a few years ago after working in renewable energy development in New York and Washington, D.C., including a stint with the Department of Defense. He says he turned to the burgeoning world of indoor agriculture as a solution to climate change and an alternative to conventional farming, or what he calls “dirty agriculture.” Read More.