Another thing the venture capital geniuses seem to have overlooked is that even in Kentucky’s hill country, greenhouses are, well, hot. At AppHarvest, they sometimes reached 155 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a Nov. 18, 2023, documentary in Grist prepared for the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. The consequences for both native Kentuckians and immigrant workers were repeated bouts of dehydration, fainting spells, and medical evacuations. Workers were knocked unconscious and pushed out on steel carts while pruning, watering, and carrying tons of tomatoes in temperatures well over 110 degrees. In a lesson in how not to run a business, “AppHarvest took people who had never done this before, put them in a greenhouse, gave them minimal training on how to do it, and expected us to produce Grade A tomatoes,” said a former worker quoted in Grist.

Despite an apparent aversion to international trade, agricultural economics, and worker health and safety (though not immigrant labor), AppHarvest managed to go from darling of the venture capital world to big-money winner in less time than Theranos. In the summer of 2023, lenders began demanding repayment of their investments. AppHarvest soon filed for bankruptcy under the U.S. Chapter 11 process. All of its facilities were sold. In 2021, when it went public at $35.19 per share, its valuation was $3.7 billion. In August of that year, its CEO informed investors that it was facing a $32 million loss. By the end of 2021, it had generated only $9 million of an expected $21 million in revenue. By early 2023, its stock price, which had peaked at $42 per share, fell below a dollar and never recovered.

In the 1960s, when the Kennedy administration was first giving the Appalachian region the attention it deserved, Ned Breathitt, the respected Democratic governor of Kentucky (1963-67), was elected on a platform that called for the protection of labor and civil rights for people of all races. His family had given Vance’s home district its name. He had defeated a colorful opponent in the primary, “Happy Jack” Chandler, who campaigned on the slogan “Stuff the Sack for Happy Jack.”

Silicon Valley and its other sponsors backed Vance financially and made him rich. When AppHarvest failed, Vance resigned from the board and the investors fled into bankruptcy. But the Kentuckians and Mexicans who worked there lost their jobs and their hopes for a new future. This pattern, seen as a testament to his business acumen, is familiar to Vance’s running mate, who started with millions in gifts from Fred Trump Sr. and filed for bankruptcy six times. Like his running mate, Vance’s greatest talent in business has been taking money from a deep-pocketed benefactor.

Carlisle Ford Runge is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law at the University of Minnesota. The views expressed in this article are his own and are not intended to reflect the views of the university.