J.D. Vance helped to fund a startup that was supposed to make things better for working people in eastern Kentucky. But not only did it fail, it provided terrible working conditions, causing employees to flee in droves—only to be soon replaced by migrant workers.
CNN reports that in 2017, in the wake of his successful book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance was hired by AOL co-founder Steve Case to invest in underserved markets. One week later, Vance took a meeting with Jonathan Webb, the founder of a startup called AppHarvest.
AppHarvest’s plan was to create an indoor farming operation growing fruits and vegetables in eastern Kentucky, an economically distressed region close to much of the U.S. population with plenty of land and water nearby. Webb had already drained his savings and maxed out his credit cards to run the startup, and he needed more cash. So he reached out to investors, including Vance.
Vance would invest $150,000 in AppHarvest, with other investors chipping in $50,000 each. While Senate disclosures say Vance was named to the company’s board of directors in March 2017, AppHarvest’s security filings say that he joined in 2020. Vance’s own venture capital firm, Narya, had AppHarvest as one of its earliest publicly disclosed investments.
Over the next few years, Vance helped the startup get millions of dollars in capital, and helped Webb as a pitchman. All the while, AppHarvest was hiring eastern Kentucky locals to help with its crops, having pledged to bring thousands of jobs to “high unemployment areas,” according to a presentation it gave to investors in 2020.
At first, things were going well, said one new hire, Anthony Morgan. He said his hours as a crop care specialist were manageable and that the benefits were better than anything else in the area. But a few months later, production fell behind and workers were put under pressure. The company cut employee health care benefits along with other costs, and hours were increased with breaks cut.
For workers like Morgan, that meant longer days in a very hot greenhouse, which put them in danger.
“I think about the hottest that I experienced was around 128 degrees,” Morgan told CNN. “A couple days a week, you’d have an ambulance show up and you seen people leaving on gurneys to go to the hospital.”
As conditions got worse, more and more workers left the company. Morgan organized a sit-in to demand better conditions and was later fired after he took time off to get treatment for an injury that he suffered on the job, he said.
Morgan’s issues were shared by other workers at the company. One other crop care specialist, Shelby Hester, said that the company didn’t provide masks for employees to deal with mold and other contaminants in the greenhouses. Hester corroborated Morgan’s account of workers experiencing heat stroke symptoms, and added that managers disregarded doctor’s notes as a reason to miss work.
With native Kentuckians leaving their jobs, their positions were soon filled by migrant workers coming from countries like Mexico and Guatemala. Politicians and other leaders, like Senator Mitch McConnell, would visit the company’s facilities, only for the migrant workers to be sent away so they wouldn’t be seen.
Kentucky state inspectors visited AppHarvest facilities but didn’t issue any citations, and instead lauded supposed company precautions like mandatory heat breaks and drinks for employees. Nothing would ever happen, and the poor working conditions were documented in a report last year by Grist and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.
The company went bankrupt in 2023 with $341 million in debt, dealing with millions of dollars in lawsuits. Vance left the company’s board in April 2021 before his run for the Senate in Ohio but still had $100,000 invested in the company. With Vance touting his business record as the Republican vice presidential nominee, AppHarvest is another big strike against him and the campaign.
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