Travis Parman, an AppHarvest spokesperson, jokes that their management team is pinged left and right by Webb. 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. His black T-shirt reads “APPH Nasdaq Listed,” a celebration of when AppHarvest went public on February 1st, 2021. 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. 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.
This generation has got to be the one of action and less talk at this point. “We can’t just demonize the systems in place. “We can use private sector capital to rebuild this world,” says Webb. 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. “But the reality is, how do we use the private sector for good?” 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.
food supply amid these unpredictable weather extremes.īut 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. 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. Go build organic biomatter and have it grow all over the place.” “Whoever developed nature out there, that’s higher forms of intelligence. The corporation went public in February, earning a $1 billion valuation. “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. “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. When massive, earth-moving construction started the same year, Webb joked with locals that he was building a giant communication tower to the aliens, helping other intelligent life find Morehead, Kentucky.īut Webb’s real interest was saving Planet Earth. He bought an RV and set it up on a hill with the water tower behind him and Daniel Boone National Forest out front. When Jonathan Webb arrived at the 500-acre former cattle farm he purchased in 2019, it was essentially an empty green field.
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