An entrepreneur helps West Virginians – gets a lesson in humility
ON A SUNNY day last October, Joe Kapp ducked out of the fresh afternoon air and into the ammonia stench of an industrial chicken house. He followed Josh Frye, the owner, into the crush of 30,000 scuttling, chirping and crapping chicks, just 10 days old and still downy. Frye has three such houses here in Wardensville, West Virginia, each the length of 1 1/2 football fields, and he walks them three times a day, nearly 300 days a year. He adjusts the temperature and ventilation, checks the water feeders and gauges the flock’s health.
“I’m in awe of this,” Kapp said as birds scooted out of his path.
“You get a run of emotions from visitors,” said Frye, 52. “From awesome to disgusting.”
After the first time he visited Frye’s farm, Kapp had come home with his boots smeared in chicken poop. “Joey, what have you been doing?” asked Carlos Gutierrez, Kapp’s partner of 25 years. And Kapp answered, “You don’t even want to know.”
When Kapp, 47, an entrepreneur, and Gutierrez, 46, an entertainment lawyer, decamped to a West Virginia cabin in 2012, industrial chicken houses were not on the agenda. They’d come to take professional sabbaticals. But Kapp, who has a restless energy and an insatiable drive to make things happen, had barely settled into his Adirondack chair when he befriended the forward-thinking president at the local community college. From there, it wasn’t long before he was helping the college to launch an innovative project, the Institute for Rural Entrepreneurship and Economic Development ( IREED), aimed at diversifying the regional economy of West Virginia’s eastern panhandle. Over the past two years, Josh Frye had become one of IREED’s most promising clients as he tried to develop his chicken farm into something much more ambitious: An innovative business with wide-reaching economic and environmental potential for the state.
And yet, determined as Kapp was to help West Virginians like Frye, he was initially blind to the challenges of such a project - not just the systemic obstacles that have kept West Virginia from adapting to a rapidly evolving economy, but the personal roadblocks he would encounter as an affluent, liberal urbanite living in a rural culture he didn’t understand. He would eventually find himself the object of a vicious online campaign, targeted with homophobia and maligned as an arrogant carpetbagger. But easy as it might be, especially in the Trump era, to write off this response as pure bigotry and partisan ignorance, Kapp took another perspective.
“I had to take some time to muck around in chicken s***,” he says. “I learned humility. If we can drop our sense of ‘we know best,’ that animus that I have been the target of doesn’t need to be there.”
I had to take some time to muck around in chicken s***,” he says. I learned humility. If we can drop our sense of ‘we know best,’ that animus that I have been the target of doesn’t need to be there. Joe Kapp, entrepreneur
Kapp has become an unlikely advocate for rural communities and their largely conservative, working- class populations. He believes this demographic has far more potential than they are given credit for. They deserve economic self- determination, he says, not empty promises to revive dying industries. He is certain that by harnessing local knowledge, like agriculture, they can start businesses and put their own people back to work.
At the same time, Kapp knows that urban partners are vital to helping these communities access resources and take entrepreneurial risks. Which creates a problem: At a moment when our country is increasingly divided, convincing West Virginians to trust the liberal, urban elites who have long maligned them isn’t easy.
No less simple, Kapp has discovered, is getting these elites - himself included - to recognise their own shortcomings. — WPBloomberg