For a self-proclaimed ‘hillbilly hero’ it seems JD Vance doesn’t much care for the little man, if new revelations about one of the vice-presidential candidate’s former ventures are anything to go by.
Before collapsing under the weight of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of debt, AppHarvest was touted as the herald of a new, tech-savvy era of farming in Eastern Kentucky. Last year, the firm filed for bankruptcy after years of pursuing aggressive growth, in part by prioritizing migrant workers from Central America despite early pledges of employment opportunities for impoverished local communities.
By that point, the company had already come under a slew of complaints over unsafe working conditions, such as employees being provided with poor quality gear and insufficient water breaks while toiling in greenhouses where temperatures are alleged to have regularly soared into triple digits. “It was a nightmare that should never have happened,” as one worker told CNN.
ADVERTISEMENT
AppHarvest’s failures further tarnishes the image of a working man’s champion that helped catapult Vance to the top of the Republican campaign alongside Donald Trump. “I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts,” Vance told the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month. “But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.”
Such comments stand in stark contrast to testimony from AppHarvest’s workers. “Eastern Kentucky is well-known for people coming and going. They start up companies, then they disappear,” Anthony Morgan, a former worker at the firm, said in the recent CNN report. “They didn’t care about us.”
“Making the decision to go work at AppHarvest, like many of us made, the livelihood just went right down the drain,” Morgan added. “I blame all of the original investors.”
A senior company manager told CNN: “The allegations made against AppHarvest do not reflect matters discussed at board meetings during JD’s tenure — for obvious reasons. AppHarvest implemented robust heat policies when temperatures rose in the summer, months after JD’s departure, continued to cover 100% of employees’ health insurance premiums until mid-2022, and maintained a workforce dedicated to Appalachia throughout its existence.”
Riding hot off the back of the tearaway success of his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Senate filings indicate Vance joined the board at AppHarvest in 2017, though the firm’s own documents state he joined three years later. He would go on to help channel millions of dollars worth of investments into the company, with its stated mission of creating local jobs by developing vertical, self-contained farming hubs in the Kentucky heartlands.
Farm worker Morgan says that by late 2020, the working culture underwent a significant shift, with cuts to healthcare benefits and longer hours in a push to meet ballooning production quotas. Bleeding employees, AppHarvest turned to hiring migrant workers in a bid to keep up the pace, eventually finding itself slapped with shareholder lawsuits over steady losses from the beginning of 2021.
A spokesperson for Vance, who left AppHarvest’s board that April but continued to hold $100,000 in the firm, said in response to the recent report the vice presidential candidate was “not aware of the operational decisions regarding hiring” and that “like all early supporters [he] believed in AppHarvest’s mission and wishes the company would have succeeded.”
