It’s not enough to talk about how you “understand the challenges” of rural America.

If you want people to give you the power to solve them? You’d better be ready to do the work. AppHarvest is what happens when you’re not.

AppHarvest was very exciting to venture capitalists and politicians.

It promised to create new jobs in Kentucky coal country, by building a network of greenhouses to produce high-value produce.

Note: https://mastodon.online/@grist@journa.host had a deep dive that's worth revisiting: https://grist.org/agriculture/appharvest-indoor-farming-morehead-kentucky/

I watched AppHarvest’s launch with interest— I’d seen a lot of ambitious new greenhouses bloom, flourish, and often fail.

Not my clients’, though. Because I helped people avoid the typical pitfalls of new greenhouses:

⛔Don’t let the greenhouse get too hot for the workers and plants.

🌱Make sure that shelves and racks can support the weight of the plants.

⚡Keep water AWAY from electric wiring. You’d think this one would be obvious to everyone… AND YET.

✅Get the 1st greenhouse right before building a 2nd (or an 8th)

👷🏻‍♀️Make sure pay & benefits are good enough to retain a trained workforce (and TRAIN them!)

🚚It’s not enough to be good at growing plants. You better nail down a tight routine for harvesting, packaging them up, tracking, and shipping.

Running any kind of farm successfully? It’s nothing like the romantic notions of “put seeds in ground, wait, harvest.”

It’s way more annoying & detail-oriented than that.

I showed my clients how to handle the annoying detail-oriented stuff. That’s why all of mine are STILL in business and are now worth $4 billion- instead of this:

By the way, something that a lot of the reporting misses:

Their greenhouses routinely hit 120-125°F. And at that point, it’s a hellhole for workers. But also, let’s not forget, YOU CAN’T GROW A VIABLE CROP AT 125°.

You’re failing at the ONE thing a farm is supposed to do!

If your farm can’t grow plants, fix that!

It's mind-boggling that they saw their heat problem as a “workers are complaining” problem. It’s a YOU CAN’T GROW PLANTS problem.

I would never let a client just… keep their greenhouse at 125°. A company that does that is too incompetent to survive. Full stop.

And here’s where Vance comes back in. He was supposed to bring “a rural perspective” to the operation. They needed someone who “got rural life.”

Greenhouses don't get this messed up all the sudden. It comes from YEARS of bad financial planning: failure to budget for proper HVAC, maintenance, & hiring. Vance was on the board when those decisions were being made.

Despite his real life track record of disqualifying failure, he’s still the guy the GOP picked to “represent rural America.”