The Midseason Panic Attack: Veteran Focus
The Haggunenons of Vicissitus Three have the most impatient chromosomes in the Galaxy. Whereas most races are content to evolve slowly and carefully over thousands of generations, discarding a prehensile toe here, nervously hazarding another nostril there, the Haggunenons … will frequently evolve several times over lunch.
—DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Now that we’ve covered what not to obsess over when the midseason panic is triggered, let’s examine where, if we’re prepared, we might shift our attention when we wake up panting. Psychologists call this phenomenon attribute substitution. It’s based on the principle that you can’t take the worry gene out of the primate but you can rewire what it is the primate worries about. When it comes down to it, there are six main ways to work off your August stress.
1. Make sure your crop’s drying, cleaning, and storage processes are dialed in. The scariest part of harvest, and arguably the most time-sensitive, is not the harvest itself. It’s the 2 hours following harvest. This might be the most overlooked component of the hemp season I’ve noticed in farmers for whom hemp is their first commercial crop.
In 2017, Jackie booked a drying and cleaning facility for the crop well in advance of harvest. Because the place was (like everything that year) 2 hours from the field, Jackie procured the longest flatbed truck I had ever seen. Dan dumped the hemp from the combine into wooden crates that were immediately loaded on to the flatbed. Still, transporting the full harvest required two trips because, well, there was a lot of it. That wound up costing the project a couple hundred pounds of seed.
Here’s the must-know piece of intelligence: The moment you harvest your hempseed, the clock is running to get it down to 8 percent moisture. That’s because the instant your seed leaves the field and is deposited in a bag or silo, it starts to compost.
“The reason that happens is that hemp is harvested greener than many grain crops,” Roger Gussiaas said. “Getting it dry is your first priority.”
Your initial harvest is a mass of green chaff: It looks like lawn shavings. Sometimes you can barely tell there are seeds in there. The crop can come out of the field at 20 percent moisture or higher.
That’s a lot of water. Try sticking your arm in a batch of hemp 45 minutes after harvest: It will be burning hot. I’m talking about nearly too hot to stand. You’ll be steam-scalded to your clavicle. Your harvest is cooking. Sautéing. Immediately.
Now it’s a sprint: You have an hour or less to get going on the drying process. You might consider getting a siren to mount atop your farm truck if you have to move your harvest to your drying location. It’s firefighter-mentality time. And it’s why the farmer’s first midseason task is to dial in the whole drying and cleaning process well before harvesttime.
For your seed harvest, there are lots of ways to do this. In 2018 in Vermont, we used a nearby organic popcorn farm’s drying facility. Solar-powered too. Talk about on brand. But not everyone has access to popcorn facilities. Clearly not most modern movie theaters. What most everyone does have access to are large fans. And these, alongside some sort of storage bin (like a small grain silo) and a decent-quality moisture tester, are what you’ll need. Adding fun for the nascent hemp farmer is that for now all but one brand of moisture tester—the Dickey-John Grain Analysis Computer—lack a calibration level for hemp. And the Dickey-John is expensive, around $4,200.
So if you and your harvest team get hold of the much-cheaper handheld field models (which start at around $250), you get to poll one another about similarly sized seeds and then average out the results of several settings: barley, corn, and amaranth, or whatever. I usually find the readings are pretty close to one another. Close enough.
Here again I was lucky in that I learned from the uber-experienced John Williamson how forced-air drying in a silo works.1 It’s not complicated. Basically, make sure you have that silo on-site or very, very close to your field. Depending on the size of your crop, it doesn’t have to be huge—just able to hold about 1,000 pounds of seed per acre of field, plus associated chaff. The silo has an open (grated) floor. Below the floor, place a huge fan. It only has to be heated air if your harvest climate is cold and humid.
Once you (or your combine or your oxen) deposit the wet harvest mass in the silo,2 snap on the fan and take a deep breath: You have started the drying process. Then spend the next 24 to 36 hours turning over your green mass with your shovel, unless your silo is fancy enough to have an automatic churning mechanism. Do this hourly. In Vermont in 2016, I loved hopping fully into the silo, breathing terpenes, and rotating the deep hemp carpet.3
The goal is to get the seed dry enough before it overheats and rots into a sterile mash. It’s simply amazing how fast this happens. Within 2 hours of harvest, the tribal project lost that entire crateful of seed in 2017. So if you have to go off-site to your own or a commercial drying facility, you’d better get your entire harvest there, fast. That experience is why I believe on-site drying facilities are a worthwhile investment.
There’s one more step once your seed is dry to 8 percent moisture: Get it into the seed cleaner. A seed cleaner is a simple multilevel agitating machine that resembles an air hockey table. It shakes like a Polaroid picture, shrugging off the chaff through progressively smaller screens; after you run your harvest through it once or thrice, you end up with squeaky-clean seed.
Now your seed is ready to be replanted, sold whole, or turned into pricey hemp hearts, omega-rich hemp oil, and my goats’ favorite: hemp-protein powder. More immediately, your seed is now ready for storage in the temperature-, moisture- and rodent-controlled facility you’ve been preparing instead of worrying about sulfur.
Today, unless you splurge for jute bags and until someone markets biofiber grain bags, there aren’t many great options for storage sacking. Some folks like vacuum-sealing their product (especially flower) in nitrogen within Mylar bags. That’s not my personal storage choice. At every stage of the farming cycle, I like to ask, “How would the shaman have done this?” And Mylar just rarely comes up. But it’s hard to avoid the woven plastic fiber of one-ton grain bags. They do the trick but, ya know, yuck. More plastic junk around the farm. I can’t wait to wean from these. Still, once the seeds are dried, cleaned, and stored, your harvest is safe and you can eat some waffles.
For her part, Jackie had a great perspective about learning this and all the project’s early lessons the hard way.
“We’ve had two extra seasons to learn how to grow and harvest hemp,” she told me of the tribe’s head start over nearly anyone else in Washington. “Sometimes I get caught up in the fact that I want it to be successful and do these awesome things for the earth. Then I remember, we’re learning.” And sure enough, with the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, the tribe is now in control of its hemp destiny.
2. Conduct your own initial THC tests, prior to your official state program test. August is also the time when a young ’un’s thoughts turn to confusing questions about THC testing. Until THC worry goes away for farmers, expect to be awakened with some form of the call I received from a colleague midseason in 2018 that said, “Does 0.33 percent mean 0.3 percent? The state should round down, right?”
First of all, if you think you could be on the cusp of a hot test result, congratulate yourself for being a good farmer. At the same time, particularly if your crop looks and smells really good, you’re wise to start doing your own testing well before harvest. Just so you have a handle on how your cannabinoid profile is developing.
Test in the morning. Test in the evening. Test flowers. Test leaves. Test your big plants. Test your small plants. Lobby for leaf testing. Go to churches and explain why not to be afraid of microlevels of THC.
Some might be guessing that all this testing can get expensive. Indeed it can. If you have a good relationship with a testing lab (as we do in the Vermont project with a regional outfit called MCR Labs), you can keep each test under $100.
If you have a lot invested in your crop (and who doesn’t?), it might be time to take the plunge and invest in one of the newfangled handheld testing machines. These start at about $700. They aren’t as accurate as lab-level machinery, but they give you an idea of your cannabinoid levels, and once you own the gear, you can conduct as many tests as you like. Plus you can check your test against a professional lab’s (or an official state test’s) result.
And for those of us who really love having something about which to panic, here’s a great one: What if even your midseason tests start creeping close to that (soon extinct) 0.3 percent level? Now you’ve got some tough decisions to make. Do you hobble your plants so that they don’t risk destruction due to inane laws? Do you (gasp) consider harvesting early and subjecting your customers to an inferior product?
There isn’t an easy answer to this hopefully retreating dilemma. But as I learned in 2018, everyone has to be prepared to face this quackmire: The same cultivar can test five times higher in THC in one location versus another. That’s what happened with Samurai that year. Only good policy saved our Vermont crop. So test early and often.
3. Gather pollen from your favorite male plants before they die back. While we work to fast-track THC irrelevance in the field, Edgar and I are also working on a breeding program to tame the Samurai a bit. You know, to make hemp cultivation less of an annual edge-of-the-seat adventure. Also we’re trying to up its CBC and CBG levels. One way to do this genetics work is by channeling Gregor Mendel, the famous 19th-century monk whose experiments in dominant and recessive genes every second grader re-creates with beans-in-a-cup.
As if you need an excuse to skip around your field dodging butterflies and taking another terpene bath, unicorn hunting is always a fun time of the season. If you’re in the dioecious camp, the time to capture male genetics is when your male plants are ripe and ready to pollinate.
By August your males will look completely different from the females. The vertically stacked pollen sacs are the giveaway. Also the bees gobbling them. It’s not hard to tell when a male flower is mature—brush against it with the force of a butterfly kiss, and pollen will leap off in a dusty little cloud.
Unicorn hunting involves looking for a specific few plants you like, either because of the way they grow (say, their branching structure, their height, or their lack of height), because of their rapidity of germination, rate of maturation, or because of the color of their fiber. Maybe you’ve just had a good feeling about a particular plant all season; Edgar’s grandson Chris named his favorite plant Henrietta in 2018 and lavished extra love and water on her that season.4
To capture hemp pollen, place a small paper or cloth sack over of the male cola flower overnight, bind it at its opening (I use hemp twine, needless to say, but a rubber band can work), and collect the pollen in the morning. Label it (with date, cultivar, location, and what you like about it), and refrigerate it.
If you’re growing strictly for a flower harvest (and thus are bringing only females to maturity), by August you’ll start “sexing out” your plants several weeks earlier than full male maturity. The reason for this is that you want all your males out of the field or greenhouse before they pollinate.
This is beyond safe sex for plants. Let’s call it what it is. You’re a dang hemp Puritan when you cultivate this way. But it is what most folks do at this moment in the industry’s evolution (assuming they aren’t growing clones or “feminized” genetics). That’s because it’s what the market currently demands if you’re trying only to maximize your CBD percentage.
I’ve become competent at this process, studying the (usually) sixth “node,” or branching, from the main stem (counting from the base of the plant) about four to six weeks after planting. You’re checking if the first flower nubbin is taking a distinctively male or a female form. Gender is already discernible even in the very early flowering stage, with the female shape more of a branching pair of “bracts” with small hairy stigmata emerging from each, and the male pre-flowers looking like small round sacs.5 Both are tiny at first, the size of BBs or smaller. This is why I like to examine the young flowers with my pocket scope—plus it looks very professional to whip out a scope in the field. But if I’m decently adept at this process, Margaret Flewellen is a savant. She can sense a plant’s gender at a glance, the way a professional poultry sexer can look at an hour-old chick and tell whether it’s a pullet or a future rooster.
And as in a chicken yard, where farmers of a spiritual ilk believe that a rooster in the yard makes for happier and more productive hens who lay healthier eggs, you needn’t remove your young males right after identifying them. I notice that even in his sinsemilla gardens Edgar shares this belief in a goal of hormonal balance in life. He’ll keep some males in the field until near maturity. You have plenty of time—several weeks—to remove the males after ID’ing them.
Now back to our dioecious crops. The reason to “bag” the cola flowers of your favorite unicorns at pollination time is that male plants generally die back after pollination. So this midseason moment is your window for saving genetics with a Y chromosome. Since they depart on their own, I don’t usually pull the males after pollination, though Edgar likes to.
Then, in the greenhouse or in the field, you take the step that always reminds me what an artist the great hemp professor Edgar Winters is, and how important it is to own your own genetics.6 It still blows my mind that this soon-to-be-multibillion-dollar industry hinges on delicately applying individual pollen grains to female hemp flowers with the kind of brush you’d use to detail a model plane. Smaller than you’d use for brushing a toddler’s teeth. It’s always a surreal experience to do this under Edgar’s and Margaret’s guidance.
“See how the females here are ready, too?” Edgar will say, looking over my shoulder. “You only have a couple of days’ window to get ’em pregnant. The two genders have to be on the same tune.”
At the same time we have a quarter of a million plants maturing an inch and a half per day outside, we become this nursery, working to advance our genetics to a place that works for our products. And there’s not a test tube or toxic substance involved.
Flower by individual flower, innovation starts with that unicorn that gives you the properties you’re seeking. And so an ancient industry is reborn in the digital age, care of an Austrian monk. Spending some time at midseason identifying your favorite plants of both genders is as vital to any agriculture-based endeavor from here on out as water and sunlight and, for that matter, sufficient initial capital.
4. Find a home for the tons of gorgeous product you’re about to find piling up in your barn. Say you’re taking Dolly’s and Wendell’s advice and developing a value-added product: If, by August, you’re not already out meeting with managers of food co-ops, dispensaries, farmers markets, and supermarkets, well, it’s not going to happen magically after harvest.
Whether your product finds a market will almost certainly be directly linked to how devotedly you get out there before harvest to let people know how passionately you believe in your plants, team, and product. The Fat Pig Society, Salt Creek, nearly everyone I know hauled tail for several years before they saw positive revenue flow.
Finding retail outlets is just the start. Have you built a website and social media presence? Figured out how much shipping will cost? Researched the price point at which comparable products are being offered? Learned labeling rules? Splurged for a booth at one or two trade shows?
5. Make Friends with Officialdom, Form Your Company, and Set Up Banking. If your product is going to be eaten by humans, you’re wise, by the time of your equivalent of the Sulfur Distraction Incident, to be well into discussions with the nice public servants at the health and food safety departments in your state. Even your processing facility will have to meet certain (and sometimes quirky) design standards for an edible product. And, of course, if you’re (wisely) going organic, your paperwork should be done by now as you will be nigh approaching your field visit from your certifiers.
By midseason, as well, you should be talking to lawyers, having your company created, your relationship with partners solidified. Are you a co-op? An LLC? A B corp? How’s your mission statement looking? Have you sent a press release to local media about the local jobs you’re creating while sequestering carbon with a healthy product?
By 2020 you should be able to obtain crop insurance if you want it, and to bank like any other business. I personally have never had a problem starting a hemp-related bank account, but many of my colleagues have. So it’s terrific that this quackmire is going away. But maybe you’ll decide to explore local credit unions or cryptocurrency options.
6. Finalize Product Design. Also by midseason, you’ll want to be wrapping up work with graphic designers so that your logo and labeling are set up. The look of your product is your perpetual commercial. It’s very important.
I find graphic designers vary greatly in the timeliness of their work. Some will bring your amazing logo ideas to life the next day, some the next year. And at about this point in the summer you should be ordering your recyclable bottles and compostable packaging. Leave a space on these labels for batch numbers: You’ve got to be able to trace the source of every bottle.
Even if you’re planning on wholesaling some or all of your flower harvest, now is the time to establish relationships with possible toll processing partners. Some of these outfits are terrific, like Sub-Zero Extracts, and some, as we touched on, are rip-off artists who offer low prices or want half your harvest. In your negotiations with toll processors, remind them that this time the farmers are in charge and negotiate a better deal than that; the industry’s getting big enough that you don’t have to agree to the first offer that comes your way. If you are a buyer, broker, or processor, please respect the farmer. She worked 10 months to get these plants to you.
But this haggling is distasteful to me and just further explains why I’m such a fan of vertically integrated, value-added product lines. I say this even though going the value-added route probably means, in the short term, 20 times the work and 5 times the risk. Of course, the payoff is much higher, not to mention that having a product insulates you against those wholesale market vicissitudes that follow any gold rush’s initial phases.
All that said, you’re also wise not to rush a product to market until it’s ready. As usual, the Colville project is being smart on this front. At the same time we were in a tizzy about sulfur, Jackie and the tribe’s graphic designer were putting together a package I helped design for a roasted whole-seed superfood product.
I’m biased, but I think the resulting package is super lit: The Colville Tribe’s wolf symbol is on the front of the package, alongside the brand name TRIBAL HEMP and the word SUPERFOOD. The back label, in addition to some hemp nutritive facts, mentions that this is a 100 percent Native-grown product, and notes that the Persians call hemp king seed. All Jackie was looking to add in the early phases of the design was a historical element linking the tribe with hemp, or at least with regenerative agriculture. There were lots of traditional salmon fishing sketches and photos, but these didn’t totally fit.
At about that time, Marc Grignon, a member of the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin and director of the Hempstead Project Heart native hemp organization, dragged me to the National Agricultural Library in Maryland, part of the national library system that includes the Library of Congress.7 The staff there was energized by our hemp requests, and nearly everything we turned up, from early hemp-fiber decorticator brochures to 19th-century letters from senior USDA officials urging hemp production, was fascinating. At one point in the day, Marc passed me a weathered index card and said in his typically understated deadpan, “This one might interest you.”
It was a report about a 1901 hemp planting in Colville. And so the product’s back label could shout that the tribe was cultivating hemp again after a century-long break.
Jackie, for a number of solid reasons, wound up starting by wholesaling the tribe’s initial marketable seed crops. Having overseen so many successful farm projects for Colville, she has been exhibiting admirable patience with the hemp project.
“We want to do a value-added product, but we want to do it right,” she told me recently. “In 2019 we’re growing for CBD.”
I replied that this sounded like a smart move, but that I hoped she will still lead the project to a value-added superfood product as at least part of its strategy. Indian Country, like every place, needs the healthy food renaissance for which hemp is proving the vanguard. And the bottom-line payoff has real potential: Instead of less than a dollar a pound for its seed wholesale, the project would be making six dollars on a three-ounce product. Granted, that’s after a lot of work and probably a $50,000 investment.
I still have original sketches for the “Tribal Hemp” product taped on my office wall: I can hardly think of something tastier for munchies-on-the-go than roasted hempseeds. It’s exactly the kind of “beyond the gold rush,” totally distinct offering that would earn the Dolly Parton “different” stamp. Add to that the tribal branding, and, man, I could see it in every grocery store in the Pacific Northwest. Asian markets love Native American–branded products too.
The reason for thinking about these product decisions during midseason is that there are dozens of threads to pull together as you consider marketing even the simplest of products. I remember calling the folks who regulate commercial kitchens in Washington and learning all kinds of random bits of knowledge about approved types of sinks and wall angles. One wonders how humans survived so long before regulations.
For some reason, all these points of veteran midseason focus don’t happen by folding your arms and blinking. They require scores of hours of work—the off-the-field, and thus less-fun kind. Many first-year enterprises (but few third-year enterprises) find themselves scrambling to take care of all these to-do items on top of the nail-biter of harvesttime.
Go ahead and worry about a few midseason leaf-cutter bites on your leaves or that deer that just gave birth in your field, if you’re one of those people who feels better when feeling worse. But if you do manage to focus on the more distant horizon of final product, you might find you’re not losing your religion over the field itself. You’ll be too busy making sure the hemp survives the day you harvest it.
SO YOU WANT TO BE A HEMP FARMER
Colorado and New Mexico
Professional hemp work, like all entrepreneurialism, is a long, hard slog. Perhaps the polar opposite of a get-rich-quick scheme. You’ve simply got to budget for a five-year road to positive revenue flow. What I’ve noticed in the years I’ve been observing the industry is that folks either understand that going in, or they quit after one or two seasons.
“We could’ve given up after we got bunk seed in year one, or when the crop wrongly tested hot in year two,” Aaron Rydell of Salt Creek Hemp tells me fairly often. “It wasn’t just a strain on our business. It was a strain on our marriage. But Salt Creek is doing all right now [at the end of year three].”
I asked him what all right meant.
“Five figures in the bank, a used combine parked next to the barn, and a healthy crew,” he said.
Not yet Silicon Valley executive remuneration, but I have little doubt that Salt Creek’s dogged persistence and righteous intent will get them there if they want that. In fact, I believe most of us launching today in the independent regenerative niche have a strong shot at thriving, if we stick with it, own our mistakes, and pay attention to a marketplace evolving at lightspeed. And, of course, if nature smiles on our fields.
Despite the hurdles, despite the temptations of the CBD craze, despite the coming regulations and, yes, despite the crooked middlemen, many of us early participants remain bullish about the regenerative side of the hemp industry’s long-term future because of a very strong card we hold: the value packed into each acre of hemp.
But it will usually take several seasons of work. That’s why we’ve been generally sidestepping discussion of the gold rushers who are all in for maximum short-term profit. In a not untypical case, I recently got an email from a fellow I’d met at a conference who said his group wants to buy “a million pounds” of flower from me and my partners—roughly the equivalent of the state of Oregon’s entire harvest in 2018.
“When someone throws that large a number at you, you might as well save time and delete the message,” said Kentucky’s Joe Hickey of Halcyon Holdings, now a permitted hemp cultivator of hundreds of acres. Joe was one of the fellows alongside Woody Harrelson when the latter was arrested for planting four hempseeds back in 1996. He added, “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to ask him to deposit half payment for the order, but you’ll never hear from him again.”
That’s how it is in most every race—the horse that bolts fastest out of the gate isn’t often the one who crosses the finish line in the money. Joe and thousands more of us are, if not yet seasoned veterans, at least beyond the honeymoon phase. We’re the ones who no longer skip around gushing about hemp’s “25,000 uses,” but rather the ones trying to do better than break even in a righteous way on one.
If you’re wise, you’ll go in aware that your uncle’s back 20 is not a check waiting to be cashed; it’s a long-term project. If you think you’ll make a killing off your first crop, you might as well save your seed money and buy lottery tickets. Farming and marketing are full-time jobs, day in and day out.
Here on the ranch, for example, my writing day has once again been interrupted by an actual hemp matter. This evening’s issue had me, until a minute ago, calculating the number of fluid ounces in a gallon, as I plan the next pressing of Hemp in Hemp.
How many gallons, factored on our three-ounce product bottles, can I produce while keeping it both farm-to-table and 100 percent organic? Both are key components of the real-world playbook if one aims to be a regenerative entrepreneur.
The Salt Creek Hemp team knows this. Poster children of the farmer-entrepreneur model in action, Aaron and wife Margaret MacKenzie even opened a hemp storefront in tiny, economically reeling Collbran, Colorado, just to try to jump-start the local economy with the multiplier effect. What they want from their 11 acres just as much as dough is to enlist their fellow struggling cattle farming neighbors in a regional hemp-processing network. They’re hoping to incite a mutually beneficial collaboration that takes their valley’s economy to the next level.
“We’ve harvested at or below cost for our neighbors just to get them fired up about hemp,” Aaron said. “It’s a long road.”
Nonstop work for years is a nonissue for the kind of hemp entrepreneurs who don’t throw in the towel after the inevitable first-season wake-up call. The endgame is just, ya know, the revival of rural America. The rebirth of Main Street. The quality all initial modern hemp players I’ve met share is indefatigability. The trait they all lack is whininess.
Non-whining beginners are welcome to hemp, because we’re all beginners. A third-generation Kentucky tobacco farmer, Kendal Clark, in softening his criticism of the performance of some Canadian hempseed he had planted in 2016, said, “Well, heck, they’ve only been at it twenty years up there.” Up to that point, I had thought the Canadians were the wizened pros at the crop. But Kendal’s tobacco genetics go back a century and a half.
With very few exceptions, we’ve all just been called up to the majors. And this is why I’m sympathetic to all those exuberant newcomers who want to see what happens when they throw an acre or 20 of hemp in the ground, as opposed to the school of seasoned farmers who sometimes espouse the “Man, what are these greenhorns thinking, planting without developing products and markets first?” viewpoint. The way I see it, we’ve all got to start somewhere. Yes, having a post-harvest game plan is vital. But you don’t know squat until you’ve actually tried to grow this crop.
So plant away, people. Only 1 percent of Americans are farming today, as opposed to 90 percent in George Washington’s day, and 30 percent when cannabis/hemp prohibition began in 1937. A return to a 30 percent farming society is a viable goal.
This is not a flash in the pan. There is real demand for our products. When Hemp Bound came out, in 2014, there were zero federally legal hemp acres planted in the United States. In 2017, there were 23,343 acres. In 2018, 78,176. Unsurprisingly, projections for 2019 acreage are for 175,000 acres, according to Eric Steenstra, executive director of the advocacy group Vote Hemp.
The emerging wider biomaterials economy really does have the potential to transform the worldwide industrial pipeline into a regenerative mode. Visualize compostable cell phones with both their outer plastic casings and their interior battery components made from your and my favorite crop. The latest versions will be delivered in electric vehicles powered by hemp batteries that are charged by the sun.
Yet hemp is still such a toddler, it can hardly even be considered a niche crop by big-picture agronomists. Those 78,176 acres in 2018? That’s compared to 89.1 million acres of corn, according to USDA figures. We’ve got a long way to go. Although corn acreage (essentially meaning GMO corn, doing little good to farmer, consumer, or soil) was down 1 percent in 2018. Domestic hemp acreage grew 334 percent. So the trend is in our direction. Only 89 million acres to go. Or 234 million if we set the bar at overtaking corn, soy, cotton, and wheat acreage. But the shift is on. And we’re gaining fast.
Let’s say we do rally, collectively, as a mass movement of independent hemp entrepreneurs, in this bottom of the ninth. What does wider world victory look like? How do these regenerative values that hemp is about to popularize strengthen communities and rebuild Main Street?
One of the best real-world models I’ve seen in action is right in my home region, where 32-year-old Nick Prince has morphed his successful computer repair business into a nonprofit called Future Forge. The venture scooped up 13,000 square feet of abandoned warehouse space in what had been a ghost town corner of our nearest town, Silver City.
The space, formerly the metal and machine shop for our region’s copper mining conglomerate, is full of terrifying industrial-grade equipment that can do everything from manufacture aircraft components to dismember a guy like me in under a second. Prince and his team have supplemented the analog hardware with sewing machines and a rack of 3-D printers.
Future Forge’s plan? “Reclaim the local economy and rebuild Main Street, by producing everything possible here from renewable materials,” Prince told me recently, as we toured the three-football-field-sized facilities. Though it has a gorgeous, Wild West–era Main Street and an organic ice cream truck, Silver City needs this radical localization; downtown businesses tend to have high turnover, and New Mexico’s poverty rate in 2017 was close to 20 percent.8
At its core, Future Forge is geek and maker central for my ecosystem. But agriculture is deeply embedded in the plan. When I told him I was about to cultivate hemp in New Mexico for the first time, Prince led me straight to the 3-D printers, pointed vigorously, and said, “What do you think we should make from the first harvest?”
I thought for a moment, remembered the hemp plastic goat I’d printed for my kids in Colorado a few months earlier, and said, “Compostable take-out servingware.”
You can access all of Future Forge’s equipment for $60 per month. My family has joined. “As the tools democratize, the future localizes,” Prince said. Farmers and digerati as soul brothers, on the same mission, for the same reasons. We were already plotting the end of disposable plastics in our county. And so the late-inning rally begins.
As I left Future Forge headquarters that day, I found myself thinking about comedian Kevin Hart’s bit where he describes being surprised, upon achieving success, to find himself living not among other actors and comedians, but among dentists and lawyers. Therefore he’s nudging his kids to become dentists or lawyers, so they, too, can live in froofy neighborhoods.
To “dentists and lawyers” I’d like to add “farmers and healthy-product makers.” There is no Dentist Aid concert. Much as I adore the music, it’d be fantastic not to need Farm Aid. So as you glean the hopefully practical tips embedded in this book’s escapades, I hope you also keep this desired result in mind: Living in a world where parents tell their kids, “Work hard and someday you might grow up to be a farmer.”