Be First, Better, or Different
New Mexico, 2019
In the week between learning about the discovery and yelling about it in San Francisco, he’d bought all the picks and shovels in the city.
—PETER YANG, writing about store owner Sam Brannan’s actions in the wake of the 1848 California gold strikes1
If we attempt to pinpoint why hemp is about to become the fastest agricultural industry ever to reach a billion dollars in annual sales, it might be because humans have an embedded genetic memory about the plant.2 Hemp has been a “camp follower” crop, say anthropologists, since before the arguable misstep of sedentary agriculture.3 Michael Pollan argues in The Botany of Desire that we actually co-evolved with cannabis and other plants. To him it just makes Darwinian sense—if a plant wants these apes to keep carrying and planting it around the planet, that plant will do its best to give them things they want: roofs, sandals, superfood, party favors. Not bad from one seed.
In an era when any material is a click away, I utilize hemp every day, strictly for performance reasons—it beats the competition: might be the plant’s seed, fiber, or flower (see the image on page 8). Often all three. I eat it, wear it—I’m about to patch my porch with a homegrown hemp fiber plaster. My laptop case is made of hemp fiber, too—I like to think hemp’s microbial-balancing properties protect me from disgusting airplane tray tables.
There is physiological evidence to support Pollan’s co-evolutionary theory. In 1992, the Israeli researcher Raphael Mechoulam discovered that we are all born with receptors for the compounds in cannabis flowers and some other plants (collectively called cannabinoids). Our built-in cannabinoid receptors constitute what is known as our endocannabinoid system. Put simply, these receptors prepare our bodies to receive the properties of cannabinoids. You can think of them as Velcro, waiting for, say, the pain-relieving components of cannabis to be introduced when we bark our shin. All mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and fish have endocannabinoid systems. There’s preliminary research into whether some invertebrates also have them.4 If they do, that sure dates our relationship with the cannabis plant way back in history.
Modern farmers reveal their encoded love for hemp without always realizing why. When my Kentucky colleague Josh Hendrix took me to an antebellum barn that sported a World War II–era hemp brake used to prepare rope for navy rigging, he demonstrated the recently rediscovered, calf-sized wooden device as though he had been using it for years.
“Hemp is deeply rooted in rural Kentucky culture,” he told me. “Most people would call this a tobacco barn. But before that it was a hemp barn.”
Seventy-seven years of cannabis prohibition, in other words, are a blip in humanity’s eight-millennia relationship with this plant.
From an economic standpoint, said Steve DeAngelo, a prominent cannabis activist since the 1970s, “the cannabis industry’s sustained double-digit growth curve is almost unprecedented in modern business history, and that’s before the whole plant is legalized federally.” The phenomenon he describes is not limited to North America—a Moroccan farmer named Adebibe Abdellatif flew halfway across the globe on his own dime to attend a 2017 United Nations cannabis session, where he told me his motivation was to ensure that the global hemp reemergence “is steered from the farm.”
DeAngelo cofounded the Harborside nonprofit dispensaries (originally Harborside Health Center) in California in 2006, and is in a unique position to characterize the industry’s growth curve. “Because of its breadth of applications, cannabis/hemp is the most disruptive economic development since Silicon Valley edged out blue chips,” he told me. “To say we’re in our infancy is an understatement when it comes to this plant’s uses and markets.”
The biggest driver of hemp since (and only since) the first research-only Farm Bill has been cannabidiol, popularly known as CBD. The market for this valuable, hemp-flower-derived nutritive supplement and topical application is growing 23 percent annually, and is on its way to being firmly established in the healthy person’s wellness lexicon, the way that omegas and aloe are.
At the moment, it’s not an exaggeration to call the CBD market a gold rush. It is one compound in the family of cannabinoids that resides in the female hemp flower. As Arthur Rouse, a Kentucky journalist who has been documenting the fits and starts of hemp’s reemergence since the 1990s, sees the current reality on the ground: “A few veins have been struck [in the hemp flower]. Now everyone’s flocking to the site of the first strike: CBD.”
CBD is terrific. It’s a compound that is genuinely benefiting millions of people. My own cannabinoid intake serves as a dietary supplement, part of my health maintenance program. CBD itself is not temporary; what is temporary is CBD-only mania and, for farmers, high wholesale prices.
Previous gold rushes, such as California’s in the 19th century, provide clear lessons. Gold, of course, was and is still being traded long after most ’49ers went bust—it wasn’t the prospectors who benefited from commodities markets. Only a few made a strike in California, and half of them got hoodwinked out of it by shady middlemen. We’re going to avoid that outcome with regard to hemp. Long-term, maximum farmer benefit is our goal for this economic boom.
The types of people who got reliably rich off the 19th-century North American gold rushes were the same ones who get rich off any boom: middlemen (crooked or legit), real estate developers, and the folks selling the shovels, pickaxes, tents, pack mules, and sacks of flour and coffee. Today hemp has its own middlemen, real estate developers, and shovel sellers, but they’re called extraction salespeople, CBD wholesalers, warehouse lessors, and venture capitalists.
Some of these folks are honest and well meaning. But there’s no denying that elements of the hemp renaissance have all the makings of one of those bursts of irrational exuberance that accompany any market bubble. The sad reality is that many of the early hemp players one sees sponsoring trade show lanyards in 2019, inexorably churning through angel investment and gunning for CBD dominance, aren’t going to be with us by 2025. The proverbial wheat will separate from the chaff (or in the case of the plant we are discussing, the bast will separate from the hurd, though both of these are valuable).
From left to right: male cannabis flower; male plant (with depiction of bast and hurd fiber); seed; seed cross-section; female plant; female flower; trichome-laden female flower prior to pollination. Illustration by Ida Pemberton, reprinted with permission by University of Colorado Museum of Natural History Herbarium (COLO).
THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE DIGITAL AGE’S HOTTEST COMMODITY
Seed: A superfood with perfect omega balance and loaded with minerals. Although fewer than 1 percent of U.S. homes today stock a hemp food product, those that do sure use a lot of it; edible hempseed, hemp protein meal, and hempseed oil already constitute a billion-dollar market in North America, one growing by double digits annually. In the near future (as in most of the past), hempseed derivatives will also provide a regenerative source for industrial solvents, resins, and glues.
Flower: Source of the current CBD gold rush, the crystalline bulbous trichomes that line hemp’s female flower contain more than 111 known compounds, called cannabinoids, many with beneficial properties, and many of which will feed future gold rushes. Absent from the hemp market just five years ago, hemp-flower products now represent 80 percent of the fast-growing industry. Overnight, the majority of hemp cultivators have migrated from the 8,000-year-old dioecious (male and female) mode of hemp cultivation to sinsemilla (female only, literally “without seed”) cultivation. That’s because they are interested only in the CBD gold rush. For now.
Stalk (Fiber): Feedstock for tomorrow’s cars, space modules, and batteries, and for today’s high-end homes and horse bedding. Hemp fiber, alongside other biomaterials, will be a key source of humanity’s migration from fossil fuels and petrochemicals. To be viable, fiber applications require large-acreage cultivation. Anything petro-plastic can do, hemp fiber and other biomaterials can do better. The hemp stalk contains two distinct components: the long strips of strong outer bast fiber, and the remaining inner core, called hurd or shiv. Each has different properties serving distinct industrial needs.
Root: Saving the planet by sequestering carbon (three billion tons annually when worldwide topsoil is rebuilt by just one inch). Hemp’s unusually long taproots help create the belowground climate to allow the world’s struggling soil to rebuild.
Even though it will require an industry that markets all parts of the hemp plant to sustain a new farming economy and sequester enough carbon to ensure a habitable planet, let’s start with the flower and discuss the market for the cannabinoids therein, because CBD is one of them. And CBD is about the hottest business and health story in the world today. Houston, Rome, Santiago, Tokyo, and Cape Town all have CBD stores. The World Health Organization has declared CBD safe. Mike Tyson, who has his own cannabis line, calls it “a miracle” for someone who’s had his cranium rattled a few times.
Cannabinoids comprise a growing group of 111 known compounds found in cannabis, other plants (such as cacao, pepper, and echinacea), and interestingly, endogenously in mammalian mother’s milk. THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the “psychoactive” component in cannabis) and CBD are the best known of these cannabinoids.5 My own favorite cannabinoid at the moment is CBC (cannabichromene), a nonpsychoactive compound showing analgesic properties, as well as anecdotal evidence of anti-inflammatory and muscle-relaxing effects.6
Plants including hemp produce cannabinoids because they serve a range of purposes including predator defense, climactic adaptation, and pollinator attraction.7 And also, as Pollan postulates, to please us.
Cannabis/hemp flowers even smell appealing. So appealing that I routinely have to check myself in the field, lest I eat the profits. The flowers contain terpenes (terps to those in the business), fragrant hydrocarbon-based compounds that are found in the essential oils of many plants. They might enhance the properties of other components of a plant (much academic research on this subject is still in progress), but their smells alone add to the value of a cannabis flower. Some farmers already breed just for terps. You can buy terpene-laden cannabis in dispensaries. Their scents and properties vary widely. (My favorite is one called pinene.)
If CBD is the mine where most prospectors, both independent and would-be giants, are currently staking their claim, it’s a near certainty that this won’t be the case in five years. Change being the only constant, I feel safe declaring that a previously unimagined market sector will emerge by 2025. I hope it’s recyclable, next-generation hempen battery components, a hempseed diet craze, or a bunch of next-wave cannabinoid-terpene combinations.
When cannabinoids and terpenes work in concert, it’s known as the entourage effect, a key argument for thinking beyond one cannabinoid when it comes to hemp product efficacy. I know I wonder about the properties embedded in blended cannabinoids—say, #7, #42 and #81—grown in a high-pinene flower. Efficacy might reside not necessarily in the sheer number of milligrams of CBD in your tincture but in the interplay of many cannabinoids in ideal ratios.8
This next-phase industry morphing we’re about to see will favor flexible, independent farmer-entrepreneurs. As my Alaskan river guide instructor taught me on the very first day of training back in 2004, “Learn to look three turns ahead.”
Folks looking for a quickstart guide to capitalizing on the CBD craze? That is not three turns ahead. That’s the momentary straightaway—you might well crash into the bank before the first turn. Especially if you’re relying on the temporarily inflated wholesale market.
But even if you’ve come to this book looking for the Powerball numbers required for a CBD jackpot, I hope you’ll approach these pages with an open mind, ultimately absorbing the following message very carefully: Yes, the CBD market is predicted to grow to $1.65 billion by 2021 from $291 million in 2017.9 But, as with previous gold rushes, independent farmers (the prospectors) won’t be earning most of it, unless we market our own products regionally, rather than wholesale our harvests to glean whatever living far-off commodities markets dictate.
For each of the past five years, hemp acreage in the United States has more than doubled, a trend likely to continue for another half decade at least. But that means something only if the industry sets its baseline standards according to regenerative principles. Fortunately for humanity, hemp’s return coincides with (and informs) the reawakening of a global awareness that the Earth is a system like a store’s shelves. Barring space mining or our evolution into some kind of pure astral awareness that obviates the body’s needs, our planet’s continually renewed resources are the only possible source of re-stocking everything that keeps the species surviving and thriving.
Vermont, one of the states where I cultivate, has focused its hemp program policy on independent, small-acreage farmers since before the 2014 federal Farm Bill provision. The state’s hemp administrator, Cary Giguere, is on message in his awareness that our best strategy for farmers, climate, and the long-term economy likely resides in a “biomaterials economy,” one based on regeneratively grown plants, algae, and other God-given supplies.
“The monoculture era hasn’t been working out for farmers or the planet,” Giguere said. “Synthetic pesticides and herbicides tend to only work for a while.”
He’s right. A 2019 United Nations report found that 22 percent of the 2.7°F temperature increase the planet has experienced in the past century and a half is due to outdated agriculture and forestry practices.10
The term regenerative agriculture was coined by Bob Rodale in the 1980s, as part of his “beyond sustainable” farming theory. Regenerative agriculture was necessitated, Rodale felt, by the small and declining amount of worldwide topsoil remaining at the end of the last century.11 Today, the term regenerative is both widely used and malleable enough that folks often ask me, “Do you mean sustainable / organic / recyclable / compostable / fair trade?” when I pepper a talk with the word. To which I answer, “If, in the course of your everyday business processes, what you’re doing will be good for humanity’s well-being generations down the line, it’s regenerative.”
In my own hemp enterprise, regenerative practice means trying to be aware of my impact in everything I do. From cultivation to packaging to delivery, it means rebuilding as I produce, so I can produce again. It includes practices like reduced–fossil fuel farming and compostable packaging.
Regenerative entrepreneurs are this book’s protagonists. They already populate a substantial hemp-industry niche. Independent farming might even be the largest component, one with a real chance to be at once the most lucrative industry sector and the one most essential for the survival of our species.
The survival aspect is fairly easy to quantify. A growing body of research suggests that each cubic inch of topsoil we restore of the world’s farmland sequesters up to three billion tons of carbon annually.12 And hemp’s substantial taproots are absolutely stunning at creating the conditions that allow for the building of topsoil. We’re all wise to root for an industry that helps with climate stabilization. If the regenerative farming mode catches on, farmers might even sequester sufficient carbon to buy us humans a crucial century to get our underlying infrastructural cards in order—the goal being to thrive, rather than panic, as we glide into the post-petroleum future.
Living, as we do, in the era in which Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary added the term bug-out bag, there’s no longer time for operational hypocrisy and greenwashing. For “We’ll import offshore CBD for a few years until we can afford to support local organic farmers.” Or “We’ll make our packaging compostable when we have some money in the bank.” We’re all one fire or flood from having to bug-out. Solutions to the climate crisis have to begin with the birth of every business. No enterprise I’ve encountered is perfect, and we don’t need to beat ourselves up if we find ourselves plugging gaps as we go. But a fundamental commitment to running completely regenerative operations must begin at launch.
The “lucrative” side is where the necessary win-win of regenerative entrepreneurialism resides: Independent hemp farmers are already showing that small-acreage, farm-to-table products are nearly always superior to mass-produced ones, the way fresh-squeezed orange juice beats frozen concentrate. Without that marketplace superiority, merely saving humanity would be a tough sell to folks entering the industry as economically stressed family farmers. The essential point is that regenerative values can still be entrepreneurial. Everyone wants to make a living.
Also important to keep in mind is that hemp is merely leading the way in this wider migration back to biomaterials as our primary industrial feedstock. This decade’s two Farm Bill provisions have released the first arrow of the coming regenerative-biomaterials-era barrage. Soon, if we’re successful in our execution and messaging, the processes hemp’s pioneers are developing will seed the industrial pipeline in areas well beyond one plant. And not just farming processes but also enterprise structural processes (like profit sharing and the values embedded in B corporations and co-ops) and financial services processes (bye-bye, crappy banks).
So thank a prohibitionist: By keeping this plant out of legal markets for three-quarters of a century, he’s handed us the opportunity to launch without the “but we’ve always done it this way” ball and chain. At the same time, the unleashed hemp industry is expanding and evolving so rapidly that there almost certainly will be a next hot app or three in play by the time this book comes out.
Relying on wholesale CBD is not a viable game plan for most independent farmers for reasons beyond even the coming fungible market price correction. In 25 years, CBD itself will be regarded the way the transistor is in the tech sphere today: very useful, a key building block in the early stages of the modern industry, but such a small part of the evolving picture as to be almost quaint, like the early video game Pong. So save a couple of your early bottles of expensive CBD; they’ll be valuable collector’s items one day. Now is the time to sidestep the CBD-only herd and explore the countless other opportunities that the hemp plant provides. Heck, CBD represents less than 1 percent of known cannabinoids. And the flower is just one of the four useful parts of the cannabis plant’s architecture (alongside seed, fiber, and root).
Flower entrepreneurs weren’t even invited to most hemp industry trade group conventions until 2014. Now CBD (and such ancillary products as extraction equipment) represents as much as 80 percent of the industry, and three out of five booths bought at industry trade shows, according to Lizzy Knight, cofounder of the NoCo Hemp Expo. Given all that hemp has to offer, that’s not a rational leap. That’s a gold rush leap. That’s a bubble.
To look at it from another angle, from 8,000 years ago through 10 years ago, male plants (or male parts of hermaphrodite plants) grew in 100 percent of hemp fields. Today they grow in 20 percent.
As Mark Reinders, managing director of Europe’s oldest hemp company, HempFlax, reminded me half a decade ago when I started researching hemp, “Success in the early modern hemp industry comes to those who are constantly ready to pivot.”
That advice is probably a truism in any new industry, especially in the digital age. When I interviewed Reinders at the HempFlax warehouses in Holland in 2013, his mechanics showered sparks on us as they frantically retrofitted the company’s harvesting equipment in order to capture this strange new part of the plant, the flower.13
“TO ANYBODY THINKING ABOUT HEMP”
On September 4, 2018, I got a voice mail from 84-year-old Wendell Berry, author of The Unsettling of America and many other books. Berry, perhaps our greatest living farmer-philosopher-poet, was calling me because I had written him (on hemp paper, of course) to invite him to speak at a hemp conference I was helping organize near his Kentucky home.
Mr. Berry’s message, related in his oscillating octogenarian timbre, is the primary theme of this book: Value-added marketing and control of production and distribution by farmers are crucial to our success. I’ve saved the voice mail and here’s a transcription of the meat of it:
I would like to say to anybody thinking about hemp, that if everybody grows it [to sell to middlemen and wholesalers], it will eventually drive the price down, and you’ll be in the same fix as the soybean people. So you need to be thinking about production control, the way that Organic Valley has thought about it [by marketing its own products], as an outgrowth of the old tobacco [cooperative] program.
In the 1930s, Berry’s father and brother helped establish the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative, aimed at circumventing the exploitive middlemen who were keeping farmers poor by controlling prices. Also called the Producers Program, the co-op’s existence overlapped almost completely with cannabis’s 77-year prohibition. As tobacco fades, the model is ready to be scooped up by hemp farmers, worldwide. In fact, there are already hemp co-ops active in Kentucky and Colorado.
Berry’s message is not just for hemp farmers. It resonates in my own remote ranching valley. When interviewing him for a National Public Radio (NPR) story about declining water supplies in the American Southwest, I noticed that my neighbor, Dennis Chavez, an old-timer, had an entire orchard of gorgeous, nearly purple heirloom apples that date back to Spanish varieties. While I crunched into one, he told me about the day, in 1976, when the regional supermarket buyers told him that all commercial apples in New Mexico would henceforth be coming from California. What a loss, in taste alone, I thought.
“We had a fine little industry going here,” Chavez told me. “It disappeared overnight. That’s when you realize that the farmers aren’t in charge of their livelihoods.”
We’re working on that, by listening to Wendell Berry and a couple of other prophets. This time, Dennis, the farmers are in charge.
So what is the wise move, if not churning out flower for the CBD wholesale market? For the answer, we turn to the great American artist and entrepreneur Dolly Parton. When I was a kid, I once heard her tell an interviewer something that has always stuck with me.
“Honey,” she said, hips a-shakin’, finger a-waggin’, “if you want to succeed, you’ve either got to be first, better, or different.”
Create your own specialty brand, in other words. Personally, I’m aiming for “better,” with a little bit of “different”: By infusing the unusual flower I grow in the hempseed oil pressed from the same crop and doing it in small batches, I think I’ve created a distinct product deserving of a bit of shelf space.
As have many others. Yes, this book presents the thesis that the independent craft sector is already hemp’s leading brand. But the fact is, none of us is the first into CBD. If you’re a small-acreage hemp farmer, someone else is going to supply Walgreens and the inevitable Coke CBD. What you can be is part of your region’s Organic Valley, Ben & Jerry’s, or Burt’s Bees. In a world of McCrap options for most things, more and more people crave the real thing.
Even in my product bottling, I don’t let the customer forget that message for a second. The product is called Hemp in Hemp and has only two ingredients on the label: HEMP FLOWER INFUSED IN ORGANIC HEMPSEED OIL. I bottle it in three-ounce maple syrup jars that scream “grown and sold by the farmer.” I work on it for 10 months and wholesale it at $50 a bottle.
That wasn’t the plan A of my initial group, by the way. We tried to find wholesale outlets for our first crop, in 2016. Then I recognized that with tons of harvested seed and a seed-oil press on the farm, we had a distinct advantage: Almost no one was infusing their flower product in seed oil, let alone their own seed oil, in 2016. That’s because most farmers were (and are) cultivating sinsemilla hemp (all-female, from the Spanish for “seedless”). They were seeking flower with 10 percent or higher CBD only. Our hemp variety was a dioecious (male and female) cultivar. These generally contain lower cannabinoid levels than female-only crops, but we harvested those tons of seed.
Today I’m so grateful that I was forced into a farm-to-table product by the wisdom of Dolly Parton and Wendell Berry. So far I’ve marketed Hemp in Hemp as a muscle, bath, and massage oil. Possibly because of my cultivar’s entourage effect, possibly because of the slow infusion mode in hempseed oil, I emerge from a bath infused with ½ teaspoon of it a gelatinous invertebrate.14 So I can sing the product’s praises as its genuine number one customer, which is important. The first small pressing of 750 bottles of Hemp in Hemp, aided by a lot of legwork over many months, eventually sold through.
This is a craft model. Hardly Coors. Vertical integration, as economists describe it when you maintain local management as your raw harvest works its way up the value chain to shelf-ready hemp merchandise, can be difficult to maintain at scale. Though if you do the math, a regionally focused, several-family enterprise that scales up to just 10,000 units at $50 per unit wholesale is making a fine living for its members. And I would argue such an enterprise is much more beneficial to the community where the independent families marketing it live than wholesale agriculture would be.15
That’s because each step of the production process that an enterprise keeps local both before and after harvesting the hemp magnifies the economic impact on our communities by about three times.16 This is a very real economic concept called the multiplier effect.
Say a group of farmers cooperatively grows and markets a hemp-flower-based sleep-aid tea at the retail level. The dollars that each co-op member is paid then recirculate in the regional economy, keeping more value on the home front than if the flower were procured from somewhere else. And that’s before considering the environmental costs of transportation. The co-op gets its equipment repaired locally (and believe me, farm equipment requires a lot of upkeep), its members eat at local markets, and pretty quickly you see how one dollar spent locally turns into three. “Put simply,” said Colin Murray, president of the American Independent Business Alliance, “the multiplier effect creates more local wealth.”
Conversely, when someone buys fungible CBD “isolate” (as it sounds, this is CBD that is machine-isolated from the hemp flower) grown who-knows-where for their product, they’re obviously helping the hemp economy. But they’re not helping the economy in their backyard as much, unless perhaps they hire folks to bottle the product. That anonymous hemp was grown and sold to a commodities broker (a middleman, or in gold rush terms, the shovel salesman) right from harvest. He concentrates it into CBD isolate and sells it to a hemp-product enterprise, for a much higher price than the farmer ever sees.
“Today’s farmers get about three cents of every retail dollar from their crops,” said Bill Althouse, cofounder of the Fat Pig Society organic hemp cooperative in Fort Collins, Colorado. “Our goal is a hundred cents, less expenses.”
The broker couldn’t care less about the rural farming economy. To a market trader, price is all that matters. Not soil. Not healthy communities. Not farmer well-being. Not sourcing regionally. Not humanity’s survival. Thus, if there’s one overarching message I hope will prove the takeaway from reading this book, it’s that the endgame for a thriving enterprise is not buyout by hedge funds or going public. It’s regional investment in a farmer-centric enterprise that focuses on regenerative values as a core principle and business MO, from cultivation to delivery.
Easier said than done, one recognizes, but I think absolutely essential if you want your grandkids to have a breathable atmosphere and drinkable water.
We have history on our side. Something I find helpful to keep in mind, especially when some pay-to-play legal team posing as a hemp industry group is proposing big ag-style regulatory standards: We’re not reinventing regenerative farming here. We’re just having fun rediscovering it after a short break and mapping it onto digital-age society. This is the dawn of the next economic phase that follows “Don’t be evil.” Maybe we can call it the “Make every single decision in your enterprise as though the survival of humanity is at stake” era.
I love this era. It’s already made my own hemp diet—which for years bankrolled the Canadian prairie economy—self-grown and free. In fact, I’m polishing off a hempseed, ginger, and mango shake right now. Sure, it takes years of exhausting work to be a successful regenerative hemp entrepreneur. But trumping everything is that it’s just so tasty.
Under the 2014 and 2018 Farm Bills’ hemp provisions, each state’s agriculture department has to establish a federally compliant state program. Until very recently, this meant my hemp work had to take place in states other than my own. Better than not cultivating hemp at all while we waited out a governor who didn’t understand hemp. Now my family is finally bringing it home. The Land of Enchantment launched its hemp program in 2019; and we hold permit number 142.
When the permit arrived in the mail with my name on it, I was a little surprised by how much it meant to me. I mean, I had already been growing hemp for four years. I actually choked up for a second, then shook it off and took a moment to appreciate this genuine triumph. The war on cannabis was done, its legacy a trillion wasted taxpayer dollars and 82,000 citizens still in federal prison for nonviolent offenses. Now I held a hemp-cultivation document in my hands. When I bought the extremely remote, 42-acre ranch in 2005, I hardly dared to dream I’d be cultivating hemp at home in 14 short years. I mean, I dreamed plenty. I believe farming, all (nontoxic) farming, is a human right, but I also didn’t fancy an armed raid while homeschooling young children.
Hemp legalization was widely considered a pipe dream back in 2006. Not one member of the US Senate supported it. Today cannabis and hemp legislation generally sails through Congress. And the 2018 Farm Bill hemp provision—introduced by the two most powerful members of the US Senate, Republican Mitch McConnell and Democrat Charles Schumer—made hemp almost, but not quite, as legal as tomatoes.
A long-hoped-for tipping point has been reached. Mainstream candidates now campaign on their pro-cannabis record. I, alongside a few thousand others (and there’s room for you), have the immensely fortuitous timing to be participating in the rebirth of a major industry.
On the evening that hemp became legal again, with Julie Andrews temporarily back in the corral (and feeding on hemp-protein meal), I remember switching off the gadgets and strolling by moonlight down to the middle of the near-future hemp field. Besides the usual pleasures of being outside with human and goat kids nearby, I’ve found I actually have to be in a field to really get a clear sense of how I want to plant, from crop spacing to watering strategy.
Hands on hips, I surveyed the meadow. I would finally get to plant at home, for my family’s food. In a few months, I’d be able to see and smell the plants from the ranch house kitchen. Oh, how this made the ol’ endorphins flow. It was a primeval feeling. You get a lot of those when you return to farming. The principal cultivar I planned on growing on our small home plot here at 5,700 feet, called Samurai, tested at 31 percent protein. It’s a heck of a diet to feed one’s family. Talk about “part of a balanced breakfast.” That evening, I confess to feeling a touch of exuberance myself.
Part of it is simply that working outdoors makes me happy, or I should say happier; I’m generally pretty happy. I have a loving family, good health, and a sweet gig. What’s to complain about?
But there’s more to it. Our resident great horned owl couple began its evening date (breakfast to them), cooing major third harmonies to each other in stereo above my head. My dogs played tug-of-war with an old cholla stick. In this distraction-free, immensely dense quiet, I felt the particular clarity allowed by a rural life.
The clarity to consciously breathe deeply of clean air. The clarity to know that no far-off government is going to take care of me. And the clarity to know that in any endeavor I’m wise to return an amount at least equal to what I and my family take.
I didn’t daydream for long. There was a lot of work to do. The hemp season had already begun, five months before a seed went into the ground. I knew because I had just drawn first blood of the season, compliments of a strand of bear grass I pulled as I weeded a swath of cover crop. Farming tip—blood from any finger is an excellent source of nitrogen for your soil. Sure, the cut was also dripping copiously onto my pants and dogs. Beats a cubicle.
SO YOU WANT TO BE A HEMP FARMER
The Farming Year Never Ends Anymore
Vermont and Oregon, 2016
Though the discerning reader will figure this out soon enough, I don’t have all the answers about how to best farm and market hemp. In fact, my main intent is to explore whether the entrepreneurial modes I preach can be successfully implemented in the marketplace—particularly when the test enterprise is led by a fellow who possesses neither the door-to-door salesman mind-set nor a particularly green thumb.
My own hemp operation—totaling seven acres across four states in 2019—is just far enough beyond my family’s personal use to edge it into the cottage industry category. Not that I’m ignoring the entrepreneurial side. I’m deep into the five-year, slow-growth plan outlined in these pages.
But beyond having a livable climate for my kids and theirs (and theirs), my goal is really just to grow and bottle a product that I enjoy myself. That accomplished, I’d rather be floating down a remote river. The actual catalyst for my, say, hauling tail to Vermont in an ice storm to bottle product or dashing to Oregon to harvest hemp in the wake of a—ho hum— millennial wildfire is I’m tired of pundits on any topic who spout at the mouth but never lay it on the line in the real world.
The effort has left me sufficiently battle scarred to offer some advice throughout the long and intense hemp season. If you are thinking of taking the leap into hemp as a regenerative entrepreneur, here’s the first of the five things I wish I’d known before becoming an enabler of the hemp plant’s ambitions. For those who simply want to enjoy hemp products, and maybe learn more about what it takes to get them to their store, hopefully seeing what one has to go through will inspire you to hug a farmer.
For a few hundred years, the farmer had a deal with society: When the crop was in, she got paid, and then she was welcome to head inside and “mend harness.” (Read: hibernate or, more recently, stream movies and eat popcorn for four months.) But that deal is off in the digital age, at least if you want to be independent and make a long-term living. In other words, if you want to share in the retail value of the crop.
Today your work isn’t finished when you’re done harvesting your crop—it’s just beginning. This piece of advice came to me from my colleague Margaret Flewellen, who founded a company called Natural Good Medicines in 2014. She makes farm-to-table products in Oregon. In fact, I call this truism Margaret’s Law, and boy, it sure would have been helpful to know before I dived into hemp.
The 20th-century farmer’s work might not have paid well, the middlemen made most of the money, and the “conventional” pesticides were often toxic. But no one was the farmer’s boss. And any number of dollars felt a lot more than zero. Even when it was just a little more than zero, after expenses. Someone else turned the wheat into Wheat Thins. All the farmer had to do was get it into the silo. Then it was Miller Time. And none too soon. You never knew whether Mother Nature was going to be friendly in a given year. Backs were sore. Farming was hard work. Today it’s the fun part.
When it comes to hemp, Margaret’s Law is all the more in play. Not only is a farm enterprise wise to turn its raw harvest into final product, but the enterprise itself is part of the very first expansion team that is creating and defining the markets themselves.
“The farming year never ends anymore,” Margaret said on the day she revealed her law to me. “If you’re in it for the long haul, you can’t just grow it. You have to sell it.”
We hemp purveyors, in other words, have the extra job of letting 99.5 percent of the population know that our product even exists. Fewer than 0.5 percent of US households had a hemp product in them in 2017, when hempseed retail giant Manitoba Harvest examined grocery and box store sales, according to Shaun Crew, former president and CEO of Hemp Oil Canada (which has since merged with Manitoba Harvest).
The length of the digital-age farming year is difficult to grasp even for many experienced, multigenerational farming families. Perhaps more so than for new farmers. I know this because I believe my inability to sufficiently convey it was the key factor in the dissolution of my original, 2016 Vermont partnership.
John Williamson, 57, was one of the best farmers I’d ever met. I probably learned more about the metrics of large-acreage farming from my collaboration with him than I have from any other human before or since. Along with a third family of good folks and fine farmers (Robin Alberti, Ken Manfredi, and clan), we planted 23 acres together on his third-generation farm outside Bennington.
John understood soil and processed biofuel in his barn so our combine harvest was petroleum-free. At planting time he even welded a roller extension onto our sowing rig so that seed-soil contact would be sufficient for germination everyplace we dropped seeds. I’ve carried innumerable lessons like that one into my ensuing hemp projects, and taught them to others, from new partners to academics to consulting clients. The guy was just a quality human being. Our 2016 harvest remains a benchmark for beauty and productivity. We brought in 1,000 pounds of seed per acre on our most productive fields, with that 31 percent protein in the seed meal and a lovely, terpene-rich flower harvest to boot.
John had been willing to test the hemp waters because the low prices his alfalfa crops were demanding made it “barely worth planting anymore.” But, as crappy as the associated dairy feed market was (and is) in Vermont, at least he used to get something come October. Enough for popcorn. Maybe enough to build a barn extension. So when I told him that not only would we not immediately be paid the moment the combine had deposited our bounty of seed and flower in various silos and storage bins, but that additional time, funds, and equipment were needed for months, perhaps years, he was out before the following spring. Alfalfa prices might not be tenable, but zip is a scary number to absorb for someone who has just burned rubber for eight months. The idea of creating a product that we would have to bottle, label, store, and peddle was anathema to him.
When things first came to a head, I was puzzled. I thought I had explained to the initial Vermont team that multiyear endurance was a prerequisite; that markets were so immature that we basically had to describe—at trade shows, farmers markets, and food co-ops—what we were even offering. Evidently I hadn’t explained clearly enough. In retrospect, I suppose I had dangled the possibility that wholesale prices could be high enough to justify selling our seed and flower right at harvest, the way John had always sold his alfalfa and other crops. Come harvest, I realized our best play was to combine the seed and flower into a value-added massage and bath oil.
Part of me wishes there had been a functioning wholesale market for that first harvest in Vermont. But even though it cost us that partnership, on balance I’m glad that I had to learn the lesson, because I am very proud of the product that resulted. I was forced to listen to Dolly Parton. And I think that a fine farm-to-table offering has resulted. At the time, though, there were some tense moments when I realized that the “well, now our work is really beginning” message wasn’t getting through to a lifelong farmer.
A year or three is a long time to ask someone not to deposit a check. This is when things get real. This is when partners forget previous conversations, because, say, an aunt needs a medical procedure or a transmission has just dropped off in the middle of a cow patty. All I can suggest is that you try to be as prepared as possible for the reality of early hemp multitasking. Draw up a multiyear budget and try to stick to it. And recognize that you can’t just harvest a crop, you can’t just create a cool product: You have to create a market for it.
I keep seeing this early Vermont lesson repeated in my colleagues’ enterprises. It comes down to, “choose your partners carefully and lay out expectations before you even create your entity.” Janel Ralph, founder of Palmetto Harmony, a CBD company in Conway, South Carolina, told me she turned down half a dozen partnership offers over the course of five years before saying yes to perhaps the world’s most accomplished hemp entrepreneur, John Roulac, founder of the California-based company Nutiva.
After two decades spent engaged in the pleasantly solitary act of writing for a living, I find that the hardest part of the whole independent-farming renaissance is dealing with other people. And I’m sure those other people can say the same of dealing with me. It’s easy for me to see now that I share equal responsibility for the dissolution of that initial group. At the time, of course, knee-deep in empty bottles and disgruntled colleagues, I felt as if I were being abandoned. That was when, 3,000 miles away, in Oregon’s Emerald Triangle, my West Coast pardner Margaret Flewellen laid the hard truth on me.
“Oh, you didn’t hammer home that farming is year-round now?” she asked. “It’s like teaching a new language. The more experienced a farmer is, the harder it is to convey. The old mode is in their blood. You can’t just tell them once, or three times. That was probably your mistake.”
I won’t forget Margaret’s Law again. Margaret, 48, should know. After years as a medicinal cannabis provider, today she crafts her hemp products from her family’s Oregon harvests: She’s got ethanol processers for tincture; fancy, giant-screened computers for labels and web marketing; and she even owns her own cellophane-rolling machine. She uses that to seal the hemp cartons for her line of Zenith CBD “hemparettes,” a product aimed at helping folks kick tobacco. That zaftig machine lives in the guest room where I sleep when I’m in for fieldwork—Margaret and her husband, Edgar Winters (this is not the rocker Edgar Winter of “Frankenstein” fame, though they are third cousins), and I have teamed up on genetic development and consulting.
She passed her law on to me, so now I hope the message helps you: You are now and forevermore an entrepreneur. And hemp entrepreneurship is almost definitely going to require multiyear endurance before you see light at the end of the workload and revenue tunnels. As 68-year-old Edgar puts it, “I work each day until I’m asleep on my feet. I lie down for a few hours. And then I get up and do it again. Doesn’t matter if it’s June or January. And I really don’t see any other way.”
Then he adds, “And when you’re really ready to drop, this is when you get a call from someone wanting an hour of your time to ask you how it’s done.”
A week off every now and then would be nice. But “We’ll sleep when we’re dead” is something of a mantra for Edgar, Margaret, my sweetheart, and me. And yet most of the time you’ll find me smiling and up for a swim. Strange.
Some professional farmers who are used to selling a crop of any kind to wholesalers will make the entrepreneurial transition, and some won’t. They definitely are a high-risk group for quitting after one season, like silent film actors who weren’t able to acquire the skill set necessary to survive in talkies. On the other hand, some of my hemp colleagues simply love the never-ending challenges.
“I’m having the time of my life,” William “Wild Bill” Billings of Colorado Hemp Project told me the other day, and I think he was at least 75 percent serious. The 69-year-old’s cell phone was in one ear as usual as he closed another seed deal somewhere far away.
Wild Bill, as everyone calls him, from US congresspeople to Jamaican ministers, was part of Colorado’s first federally permitted hemp crop in 2014. Fiber from that harvest went into an insert included with the 25 percent–hemp monograph I wrote about the 2014 hemp season, called First Legal Harvest. Now Wild Bill has got his fingers in hundreds of acres all over the world. This is a guy who knows where his work gloves are. Hemp is his calling. It has to be.
“It’s a new world,” he told me. “Farming is gonna save us. But it’s not your grandmother’s farming.”
There is one connecting thread between today’s farming and your grandmother’s farming, though, and it’s a fundamental one: the soil. As a producer, once the question evolves from only “Can I make a living?” to “Will my hemp enterprise also be of value to my community and the atmosphere?” the answer begins exactly there: not in the lush green plants to come, but in the decisions you make underground long before the planting season even starts.