AppHarvest Opens New Strawberry and Cucumber Production Facility
November 8, 2022 AppHarvest has opened its newest facility in Somerset, KY, a 30-acre high-tech indoor farm that will grow strawberries and cucumbers. The company also confirmed it has begun commercial shipments of strawberries.
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The AppHarvest Somerset farm is designed to grow nearly 1 million strawberry plants at a time, which are expected to produce for about eight months of the year. AppHarvest is growing WOW Berries for Mastronardi Produce. The crop is expected to alternate seasonally with English cucumbers.
The AppHarvest Somerset facility is designed to leverage sunshine and rainwater boosted with technology when needed and is automated for lighting, humidity, and temperature. The farm uses a closed-loop irrigation system, which enables expected water savings of up to 90% compared to open-field farming and allows for precision dosing of nutrients.
The high-tech farm also features a blast chiller that rapidly lowers the temperature of harvested strawberries prior to packaging to extend shelf life. With its central location in Appalachia, AppHarvest is within a single day’s drive of about 70% of the U.S. population, which helps reduce energy consumption required to transport the produce and is a key benefit with more highly perishable crops, such as strawberries, to deliver them fresh and with a longer shelf life.
“The AppHarvest team has set a new bar in the controlled environment agriculture sector by bringing these new high-tech farms online quickly and by diversifying our crops to add washed-and-ready-to-eat salad greens and strawberries to our current tomato offering,” says AppHarvest Founder & CEO Jonathan Webb. “We are eager to see these new farms start generating revenue for the company while they help build a climate-resilient, more sustainable domestic food supply providing good jobs in the U.S.”
With the Somerset farm opening, AppHarvest now has three farms shipping produce to national customers this fall. Last week, AppHarvest announced the opening of its Berea salad greens farm, which is opening on a phased approach and will have the capacity to grow about 35 million lettuce plants at a time, with such capacity renewing every three to four weeks. The AppHarvest Morehead farm expects to begin its third harvest shortly, and the company expects to start planting the new 60-acre Richmond tomato farm in November.
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