
2021-10-26 | New Roads Magazine
Seeds of Science
AppHarvest builds indoor farms and places robots, AI, and other tech tools in the hands of farmers. The goal is simple: to revolutionize U.S. food production.
Farmers are facing critical challenges today — among them are unpredictable weather patterns; soils that lack vital nutrients for crops; and a growing world population that demands more food than ever before.
Jonathan Webb thinks he has the solution: Move the farm indoors. The whole farm.
Webb’s first greenhouse, built in Morehead, Kentucky, by his new venture, AppHarvest, is a glass structure that encloses 2.8 million square feet. Which, for reference, is nearly 50 football fields.
Here, in what amounts to a 60-acre indoor garden, tomato vines climb up specially designed support frames to grow as high as 45 feet tall. A computer-controlled robotic data system monitors all aspects of growth, and a proprietary all-natural slurry of water and nutrients is drip-fed directly into the plants’ roots, which ensures that each individual fruit achieves its optimal size and ripeness.
“This allows us to grow with 90 percent less water and get up to 30 times more product per acre than outdoor farms,” Webb says.
According to Webb, AppHarvest’s flagship outpost in Morehead can produce a yield equivalent to 1,800 acres of open field production. AppHarvest doesn’t even pump any water to irrigate its crops. Instead, it relies on recycled rainfall, collected from the immense roof of its facility and stored in holding tanks, where it requires only filtration through sand and UV light before being used.
Webb was born and raised in eastern Kentucky, and, after earning a degree in business at the University of Kentucky, he worked with the U.S. Army Office of Energy Initiatives, building wind and solar projects on military installations.
This background taught him a valuable lesson in disruption. “Being from one of the largest coal-producing states in the U.S., I saw firsthand the collapse of the coal industry and the rise of renewable energy,” Webb says.
So, when people ask him how quickly agriculture can shift, he refers them to the energy sector. “Just about every coal company has gone bankrupt in the past 15 years,” he says. “And renewable energy went from this nascent industry to something huge.”
Technology is a fundamental principle for the facility, and robots are key in the AppHarvest vision.
“Our flagship Morehead facility, filled with sensors and actuators, is kind of a giant robot itself,” says the company’s chief tech officer, Josh Lessing. These sensors — which measure temperature, humidity, light, movement, and even the presence of bugs — allow the artificial intelligence system to control the greenhouse’s climate and the plants’ feeding schedule, or even release “good” bugs to eat the “bad” ones. “But we also plan for a supplemental workforce of robots that can work alongside people, to provide cover when too much product is growing, or to work on weekends,” Lessing says.
Lessing is quick to correct any thought that the company is planning a human-free greenhouse. “There are so many ways in which what we do as people is special,” he says. “The robots that we deploy are designed to be safe to work around and with people. If we can free people up to spend more time on the aspects of crop care that can only be done with the human brain and hands, that drives great outcomes for our customers and our community.”




