The rise of giant indoor farms for Appalachian Kentucky

Nancy Hatfield was working the night shift as an assistant manager at a 24-hour Shell gas station in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, when she learned that the new indoor farm—just 20 minutes away in Morehead—was hiring.

Hatfield, who is 27 and has two young daughters, says before her eldest started school, the late hours weren't so bad. Her husband would take care of the kids at night, and she would spend the day with them before heading back to her job at 5 p.m.

"It was great," she told me. "Then Madeline started school, and I was like, 'If I'm at work all night and she's at school all day, I'm never going to see her.' And that didn't sit well with me, so I went on the hunt for a different job."

Now, Hatfield spends evenings with her family and days helping take meticulous care of hundreds of thousands of tomato plants in a glass-roofed greenhouse the size of 50 football fields. She started working for AppHarvest—a company she says many in the community had their eyes on—shortly after it went into production in March 2021, right before the first harvest of hydroponic tomatoes.

Hatfield is one of around 500 AppHarvest employees from Morehead and other nearby towns in this region of Appalachian Kentucky, a small army of plant tenders called "crop care specialists" who show up every day in brightly colored T-shirts. The jobs—which start at $13 an hour and provide health insurance and productivity bonuses—have been popular in a region where the average household income is 40 percent less than the national average, and living-wage jobs have been scarce in recent years.

For Hatfield, it was a step up. "There hadn't been anything similar in the Morehead area," she told me. "A lot of people either work in fast food, education, or in the medical industry. So, this gives people an option in the agriculture field, without having a degree."

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A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, a members-only monthly newsletter from Civil Eats. To read the full issue, with exclusive reporting, interviews, photographs, and more, become a member today.

Photo Caption: An Appharvest employee harvesting tomatoes in Morehead, Kentucky. (Photo courtesy of Appharvest)

Source: Civil Eats