This giant hydroponic greenhouse is the future

But Webb's real interest was saving Planet Earth.

"We believe that Planet Earth is the hidden gem of the known universe," Webb tells me during a tour of his AppHarvest facility, the $150 million, 60-acre greenhouse (think 50 football fields) that briefly ranked as the 9th largest building in the world when it opened in October 2020.

"I'm a huge believer that nature is the most technologically advanced thing we have on Planet Earth, and we need to harness it," says Webb, the 36-year-old founder and CEO of AppHarvest. The corporation went public in February, earning a $1 billion valuation. "Whoever developed nature out there, that's higher forms of intelligence. Building an iPhone? That's easy. Go build organic biomatter and have it grow all over the place."

The Morehead facility is the first of 12 high-tech farms that Webb is planning to build throughout eastern Kentucky. At its core, AppHarvest runs on the agricultural resources that have helped humans feed themselves for over 10,000 years: sun and water. But there's two caveats: First, AppHarvest doesn't use soil; its hydroponic system means it is heavily reliant on man-made fertilizers (but without pesticides). Second, the greenhouses use technology like robotics and AI to better predict crop health and yield. Webb, in fact, balks at the term greenhouse, preferring to call his colossal projects "data driven farms."

"A greenhouse is not a greenhouse in the same way a sports car in 1940 has nothing in common with a 2021 Tesla except for four wheels and a steering wheel," he says.

Webb's goal is to lower domestic dependence on pesticide-laden foreign imports, which provide 70 percent of U.S. vine crops at the grocery store (tomatoes, berries, cucumbers, peppers). And Webb, a Kentuckian himself, wants to provide jobs to Appalachia. But his motivation goes beyond that, he says, to the same obsessive anxiety many in his generation are facing: the screeching freight train of climate change.

"I know people don't really believe me, but every night, including last night, I am personally terrified about the future of human existence," Webb says. "I mean 2050, it's coming, and our heads are in the sand, and Rome is burning, and we're not moving fast enough."

The 0 million AppHarvest facility in Morehead, Kentucky, with a 60-acre greenhouse. AppHarvest founder Jonathan Webb prefers to call it a "data-driven farm." - Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

Webb's plan for a new agricultural economy could bolster a region known for landscapes and livelihoods heavily scarred by the coal industry, a primary driver of the greenhouse gas emissions feeding the climate crisis. The reality of this crisis escalates daily: heat waves and unrelenting wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, drought evaporating drinking water in the Southwest, metronomic hurricanes emptying coastal towns, and extreme ice storms and flooding events devastating croplands and communities across the Midwest and the South.

Webb claims AppHarvest's "controlled-environment agriculture" is the third wave of tech-laden solutions, following renewable energy grids and electric cars, and will help shore up a U.S. food supply amid these unpredictable weather extremes.

But is controlled environment agriculture at AppHarvest's scale a climate solution, or just another energy-intensive distraction? And are Kentuckians truly going to be the beneficiaries of a company following a corporate playbook, beholden to corporate shareholders? Webb's is an unapologetically ecomodernist approach, with a full-throttle embrace of capitalism — though, in a strange contortion, he self-identifies as anti-establishment. "I'm anti-Wall Street. This is the first stock I've ever owned," he says, adding that he has since bought into both Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and a few others. "But the reality is, how do we use the private sector for good?"

The ecoleft would say that runaway technology and capitalism got us into this climate mess, and are the last tools we should be reaching for, but Webb is betting big that they are wrong.

"We can use private sector capital to rebuild this world," says Webb. "We can't just demonize the systems in place. We need to use them. We're all pawns. Play the game and win. This generation has got to be the one of action and less talk at this point. There's nothing to talk about anymore. Just do it."

At 7 a.m. on a Tuesday in early June, Webb is already bursting with energy, hands shoved in his pockets, rocking back and forth from his heels to his toes. He's dressed in his typical uniform: grey running shoes, acid-wash jeans, a baseball cap atop shaggy strawberry blond hair, round tortoiseshell glasses and a mustache. His black T-shirt reads "APPH Nasdaq Listed," a celebration of when AppHarvest went public on February 1st, 2021.

He jumps between topics quickly, pausing to tell me he has attention deficit disorder in the midst of a speech about their pest-management system. Travis Parman, an AppHarvest spokesperson, jokes that their management team is pinged left and right by Webb. "If it's in his head, it's in a text," Parman says.

Beneath Webb's fast-talking, grand-metaphor-inducing world visions might be a bit of a savior complex, complete with a tidy origin story of the genius striking out on his own, a la the founders of Google in their garage. Except with Webb, it was a small cabin in Pikeville, Kentucky, where he says he showed up with a backpack, his laptop and a dream (he was also given an office at the University of Pikeville). Three years later, he has a management team and board of directors culled from Impossible Foods, ExxonMobil, and the Environmental Defense Fund. Plus Martha Stewart, who joined after a visit from Webb in 2019.

While Webb's ambitions are grand, he's no stranger to large-scale, new-economy projects. When he graduated from the University of Kentucky's business program in 2008, at the height of the recession, he applied to hundreds of jobs before finding his way into a career in Washington, D.C. during the Obama administration, building solar grids on Department of Defense land. There, he watched the solar and wind industries blast off over the same decade that coal irrecoverably collapsed due to competition from natural gas, mechanization, and thinning seams.

At the same time, Webb began hearing about food security. By 2050 the world will need up to 70 percent more food than it currently produces to feed a predicted 9.7 billion people and a rising middle class, according to an oft-cited 2009 report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Webb read about a solution in a 2017 National Geographic article, "How Netherlands Feeds the World," highlighting enormous Dutch greenhouses that provide huge quantities of food year-round with a smaller square footage than traditional farming. He quit his job and started AppHarvest that same year.

"To get to 50-70 percent more food, as we currently grow it, we would need two Planet Earths," says Webb. And there are more demands on the planet than just agriculture. Conservation biologists like E.O. Wilson predict we need to preserve half of the world's land and water to protect 80 percent of the remaining biodiversity on the planet.

"So how do we free up land and water?" Webb asks, spreading out his arms in front of the greenhouse, "You're looking at it."

Jonathan Webb, CEO of AppHarvest. "If we do half of what we're talking about, we will be one of the largest food and agricultural companies in my lifetime," he says. - Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

At the entrance to the greenhouse's west side, Webb dons a mad scientist lab coat and we take off on a Power Bee, a tiny yellow vehicle pulling two metal carts. The Bee beeps our way through hundreds of rows of tomatoes, the glass-paneled ceiling towering above us like an airport hangar, with Webb greeting everyone we pass — "Let's rock and roll" being a preferred salutation.

Annually, up to 45 million pounds of tomatoes (from about 720,000 plants) will be harvested from this single greenhouse. Each tomato plant — red, round beefsteak tomatoes on the east side, and tomatoes-on-the-vine twisting through the west side — is carefully monitored through a control room decked out with standing desks and large screens where the temperature, nutrients, water, and light are watched and tweaked. Soon, other AppHarvest greenhouses will grow things like lettuce and strawberries.

AppHarvest claims to produce up to 30 times the yields of conventional agriculture. "This 60-acre under-glass facility can do the equivalent of 1,500-2,000 [open-field] acres in California or Mexico," says Webb as he peels past a group of workers, some with wet towels on their heads and others with grey fans that look like large headphones around their necks, provided after workers complained of the heat.

AppHarvest says they've also reduced water consumption by 90 percent compared to traditional open-field agriculture by using a closed loop irrigation system that's 100 percent reliant on rainwater, which makes Kentucky an optimal location — the state has had its wettest decade on record, and in 2020 was the wettest state in the U.S.

"You look at all these tech billionaires looking to leave the planet and go to Mars, but water is the one thing Planet Earth has that nowhere else in the known universe has," Webb says, talking quickly. "When water becomes the price of oil, that's that Mad Max post-apocalyptic world that's on the horizon if we don't get it straight."

Kentucky is also optimal because the location cuts down on shipping distances, AppHarvest says. Seventy percent of the U.S. is within a day's drive of Kentucky, reducing transportation emissions by 80 percent. And, they tout, a 50/50 mix of LED and traditional light bulbs has reduced their electricity consumption by almost 20 percent.

But energy is perhaps the most pressing problem in controlled-environment agriculture, especially in Kentucky, which, as of 2019, still depended on coal for 73 percent of its electricity generation.

"Here in Kentucky, electricity primarily comes from coal, so with an AppHarvest tomato we're trading fossil fuels for this product," says Martin Richards, formerly an organic farmer and now executive director of Community Farm Alliance, a Kentucky nonprofit founded by dairy and tobacco growers in 1985.

In controlled-environment agriculture, most of the resources naturally utilized in traditional farming are provided artificially, which can make greenhouses hugely energy intensive.

"You have to construct greenhouse facilities, and then literally build systems that replace what nature would otherwise provide," says Ricardo Salvador, director and senior scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists' food and environment program. "A good rule of thumb on the thermodynamics of it is the more technology you use, the more energy you use, and the more carbon dioxide equivalents you're going to generate."

A 2015 study in Yuma, Arizona comparing hydroponic lettuce with conventional lettuce growth reported that while hydroponics produced over 10 times the conventional yield, growers also used 82 times more energy.

AppHarvest's baseline carbon footprint has not yet been determined since operations began in October 2020. They say they are waiting to have a year's worth of data and expect to include it in their 2021 sustainability report.

But Webb is quick to denounce criticisms. When I ask him about the energy problem, he says AppHarvest is an agricultural company, not an energy company: "Tesla, they build electric vehicles that go on the grid. They're not building solar for every car in the same way we're not building solar for our fruits and vegetables."

AppHarvest is, however, trying to lower its fossil fuel use, says Jackie Roberts, the company's chief sustainability officer. She's working with Schneider Electric, a sustainable energy specialist, on a request for proposals to add renewables into the grid.

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All Photos Credit: Jon Cherry for Rolling Stone

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