When JD Vance returned to Ohio from California in 2016, he created a "nonprofit" that was supposedly dedicated to addressing the Appalachian region’s issues with drugs and chronic unemployment. Our Ohio Renewal was supposed to “make it easier for disadvantaged children to achieve their dreams.” But the nonprofit closed its doors just two years later with no significant achievements other than paying a political consultant to help Vance launch his run for the Senate.
That wasn’t Vance’s only big failure in the area where he grew up. There was also the high-tech agriculture startup, AppHarvest , where Vance was an early investor, board member, and spokesperson. As Grist reported in 2023, AppHarvest promised to tackle the same issues that Vance’s shuttered nonprofit failed to address.
It promised good salaries, big bonuses, and opportunities for promotion. Workers would get 100% employer-paid health care, stock options, and boxes of their own fresh vegetables to take home. Those who had previously been incarcerated for issues related to opioid addiction were welcomed.
That was the promise. What AppHarvest delivered was a “grueling hell on earth.” As Capital and Main reported in July, Vance has taken a long trek from green energy investor to fossil fuel promoter over the course of his move from California banker to Donald Trump’s running mate.
That includes a flip-flop on providing protection to coal-based power plants. But AppHarvest looked like a company where Vance really could have it both ways. As West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported in February, the idea was to create 18 massive greenhouses that would be used to raise vegetables on an industrial scale and “help replace the fading coal industry.
” Workers in the area would get a chance at all those good-paying, bonus-laden jobs, while power for the greenhouses would come mostly from local power plants that were still burning coal. AppHarvest would be “green” in the sense that it was producing vegetables, but it wouldn’t directly compete with coal and would use it for power. A win-win .
.. so long as everyone agreed to keep ignoring the climate crisis.
With the backing of Vance’s Narya Ventures and other investment firms, AppHarvest managed to raise an astounding $800 million dollars before it had built its first greenhouse. By 2021, Vance was on Fox Business to cheer on AppHarvest’s Wall Street debut. Fox talked about how the company would use recycled rainwater for its crops, avoid pesticides, and how its board also included Martha Stewart.
Vance complained that the average supermarket tomato was grown “south of the border” by “people who don’t have great lives.” Asked what made AppHarvest different from other agricultural startups, Vance bragged that while other companies were driving an old car, “we’re driving a Ferrari.” He went on to say that “the sky is the limit” for this incredible company.
However, as CNN reports, what was incredible is the actual conditions that met workers when they stepped into AppHarvest’s first greenhouse. One worker, Anthony Morgan, reported that temperatures in the greenhouse could regularly reach 128 degrees. “A couple days a week, you’d have an ambulance show up and you see people leaving on gurneys to go to the hospital,” Morgan told CNN.
“It was a nightmare that should have never happened.” Another worker, Shelby Hester, reported to CNN that she was having to bring her own N95 masks into the hot, humid warehouse. Not as a protection against COVID-19, but because she was getting sick from “the amount of mold and just nasty stuff that was in there.
” According to Grist , the heat index in the greenhouses could reach the 140s or even the 150s. One corporate worker told them that AppHarvest had been sold to people in the area as a “beautiful pipe dream” but was really “a f—ing nightmare.” Another reported on how they had hidden all the Spanish-speaking “contract laborers” before a tour of a greenhouse by Sen.
Mitch McConnell. Just two years after Vance was on Fox promoting the company’s stock, AppHarvest was in ruins, leaving behind hundreds of millions in debt. Rather than helping the Kentuckians Vance had vowed to help, AppHarvest provided a "grim" experience of poor safety and grueling work where those inside the heat were denied even regular water breaks.
Vance's book , “Hillbilly Elegy,” showed his disdain for the people in the region where he grew up. His fake nonprofit and his failed, abusive company show that his attitude toward “hillbillies” hasn’t changed. Invest in a future legitimately worth having by sending $10 to the Harris/Walz campaign today.
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