It’s the collective that’s making this thing possible.” He pointed out that, “At NASA in the 60s, if you would go visit a facility and you walked up to a janitor and asked, ‘What do you do here?’ they would say, ‘I’m working to put a man on the moon.’ That’s been the same mentality here. It was clear that their work culture is infused with a “pioneering mentality,” and that Webb feels strongly about keeping that culture consistent as the company expands. I got to visit AppHarvest in November, and the sheer enthusiasm Webb has built in his staff is phenomenal. not only do we have a problem we want to solve, we have a place in the world that wants to solve it with us.”Ī crop care specialist carries boxes of tomatoes through a column of crops, pruning as she goes AppHarvest Are we perfect? No, we’ve made some mistakes. He acknowledges that scaling up so quickly in the middle of a pandemic is, “almost unheard of in the current world. Most of those employees were hired in the midst of 2020, something that Webb considers a testament to the trust his community has placed in AppHarvest. Which is important, because AppHarvest employs well over 300 people in its Morehead facility alone. It made good logistical sense since Kentucky is within a day’s drive of 70% of the United States, plus there was an untapped labor force there ready and waiting to be hired. Kentucky has been experiencing record amounts of rainfall in recent years, so for Webb, the location was obvious. Two years into production, AppHarvest already provides 500 living wage jobs, is a second chance employer, and “aims to hire a team as diverse as our nation and then empower them as individuals.” Plus, the company is a B corp, a public benefit corporation, and it’s publicly traded. When he says sustainable, he doesn’t just mean that in an environmental sense. With that difficult work that in mind, Webb has designed his company to grow as much produce as possible as sustainably as possible. Jonathan Webb poses with celebrity investor Martha Stewart and some of his signature tomatoes AppHarvest Even with the help of AI, farm work at AppHarvest is still hard, manual labor. When people and robots work together, it’s actually more productive than robots alone or people alone.” On a traditional farm, there are a seemingly infinite number of tasks to do at any given moment, so adding some computers to make it more efficient doesn’t mean that human farmers will be anywhere near obsolete any time soon. They’re designed to work alongside people. They’re designed to be safe around people. That world will look pretty different from the one we live in now, but Lessing assured me that even as AI gets firmly integrated into agriculture, AppHarvest’s robots are, “fundamentally collaborative. the thing that needs to be added to that recipe is folks that want to be aggressive in getting us ready for a world where it’s hard to grow crops.” He noted that in traditional agriculture, most everything happens incrementally, “But now is not a time for incrementalism. That might sound straight from science fiction, but AppHarvest’s CTO Josh Lessing, who designed many of these universal harvesting systems says we only think that because farming has been so slow to innovate. Those robots have collected the world’s largest data set of tomato images, and each one is equipped with cameras and a laser that creates a 3D scan of the crops in front of it to determine what needs to be done at any given moment. AppHarvest’s crops are monitored for quality control 24/7 and harvested robotically, a labor-saving advancement that lets the staff treat farming almost like a manufacturing process.
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