Just a week after opening its second high-tech indoor farm, AppHarvest (Nasdaq: APPH) announced the opening of its third facility late Thursday.
The new 30-acre farm in Somerset, Kentucky, will grow strawberries and cucumbers, and has already started commercial shipments of the latter. As I reported last week, the other recently opened 15-acre facility in Berea, Kentucky, is growing salad greens.
The AppHarvest Somerset farm is designed to grow nearly one million strawberry plants at a time, which are expected to produce for about eight months of the year, according to a news release. AppHarvest is growing strawberries for Mastronardi Produce, which is expected to alternate seasonally with English cucumbers.
In addition to its controlled environment agriculture facility, 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 release continued.
“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,” said AppHarvest founder and CEO Jonathan Webb, in the release. “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.”
The company got $50 million in financing to support the development of the Somerset facility, I reported in August. That came in the form of two loans guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) through Greater Commercial Lending (GCL), a subsidiary of Greater Nevada Credit Union.
With the Somerset farm opening, AppHarvest now has three farms shipping produce to national customers this fall, including Berea and its flagship tomato-growing facility in Morehead, Kentucky.
The Morehead farm expects to begin its third harvest shortly, and the company expects to start planting the new 60-acre Richmond, Kentucky, tomato farm in November. The Richmond farm is expected to double the company’s tomato capacity, and — combined with Morehead — the company expects to be able to grow nearly 1.5 million tomato plants at a time.
AppHarvest has about 600 employees, and that is expected to increase to roughly 1,000 by the end of the year when all four of its farms are operational.
AppHarvest's net sales in the second quarter were $4.4 million on 6 million pounds of tomatoes sold with a net sales price of 72 cents per pound versus net sales of $3.1 million on 8.6 million pounds of tomatoes sold with a net sales price of 36 cents per pound in the second quarter of 2021, representing a nearly 40% increase in quarterly net sales year over year. The company will announce third quarter earnings next week.
As of 1 p.m. Friday, AppHarvest's price per share was $1.93, up more than 1.5% from when trading opened.
