Mar 7, 2023; Washington, DC; Senator JD Vance (R-OH) listens as Jerome Powell, Chair, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, testifies in front of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee during a hearing on the Federal Reserve’s Semiannual Monetary Policy Report. Photo: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY via IMAGN
Just like Donald Trump, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance has a pattern of overpromising and underdelivering. This pattern surfaced yet again recently in the story of a high-tech farming company that he invested in — it later imploded.
In 2017, in the wake of Vance’s blockbuster Hillbilly Elegy book debut, the then-venture capitalist met with the founder of AppHarvest, an indoor farming venture based in Eastern Kentucky. The company was seeking funding to build greenhouses, with the promise of high-paying jobs and benefits for workers in a chronically underemployed area, one Vance purported to know well.
Related:
Vance became a major backer of the so-called indoor vertical farming hub, joining the board of directors and attracting tens of millions of dollars in capital to the venture, according to an investigation by CNN.
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“It’s not just a good investment opportunity, it’s a great business that’s making a big difference in the world,” Vance told Fox Business on the day the company went public in 2021.
The start-up attracted locals with high-tech hype over jobs that were essentially indoor farmworker positions.
“AppHarvest was the talk of the town,” said Anthony Morgan, who left his job at an automobile parts plant for a job as a “crop care specialist” pruning tomatoes at the company’s 60-acre mega greenhouse. “A major emphasis with them was ‘We want to bring work to Eastern Kentucky. This is why we are here.’”
Things went downhill fast.
When production fell behind, the company cut costs — including promised health care benefits — and quotas went up. This resulted in longer hours and fewer breaks.
Then there was the heat.
“I think about the hottest that I experienced was around 128 degrees,” Morgan said. “A couple days a week, you’d have an ambulance show up, and you seen people leaving on gurneys to go to the hospital.”
Locals began quitting in droves, so AppHarvest turned to the same people that farms across the country rely on to harvest crops: migrant workers.
“They brought Mitch McConnell into the greenhouse, and they sent every single Hispanic worker home before he got there,” one former employee recalled. “He then proceeded to have a speech about how we were taking the jobs from the Mexicans.”
By this time, investors in AppHarvest were revolting, suing management for misrepresenting company finances.
In 2021, the company’s valuation soared to over a $1 billion; two years later it went under with $341 million in debt.
By that time, JD Vance had moved on. While he remained an investor, Vance left the board in 2021 to pursue his race for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat.
But even after employees filed complaints over intolerable working conditions and other investors began questioning management — and the company continued relying on Mexican and Guatemalan workers to make their quotas — Vance kept hawking the promise of AppHarvest creating jobs for the people of Appalachia as part of his Hillbilly Elegy narrative.
Said “crop care specialist” Anthony Morgan, “making the decision to go to work at AppHarvest, like many of us made, the livelihood just went right down the drain.”
“I blame all of the original investors,” he added.
Kentucky is a “right-to-work” state where unions are scarce. In an appearance before the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Vance’s VP opponent Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota reminded his audience of the Trump ticket’s hostility to workers’ rights.
Trump and Vance have “waged war on working people,” the former union member said, adding, “When unions are strong, America is strong.”
