Why I Grow Hemp

After the boom season of 2019, when planted hemp acreage in America went from 78,000 acres the year prior to half a million acres, the oversupply left some hemp farmers challenged, while others thrived. But whatever the year held for them, hemp farmers remain filled with a sense of passion, purpose, and love. Big-picture people  Frances “Franny” Tacy is all about the love. She’s your cool cousin who does quirky things on that farm outside of town—you know, the place with “LOVE” painted on the barn that hosts baby goat yoga and is also a rustic Airbnb. Tacy is a former pharmaceutical exec (known then as “the hippie in high heels”) who turned rogue. She’s working with The Utopian Seed Project to reintroduce native crops to the Appalachians and bring back heritage strains of everything from okra to beans. In 2017, she started growing hemp on Franny’s Farm, a 33-acre labor of love outside Asheville, NC. Today, she has half a dozen CBD dispensaries across four states—a savvy move given that health-promoting CBD is the hemp-derived ingredient people have been clamoring for. “Our farm is this incubator for ideas that come to fruition that have never been done before,” says Tacy. When Tacy switched gears in her career, from pharma to farm, she already had a farm in the rolling Appalachians. Western North Carolina is renowned as being one of the most biologically diverse areas of the country. So, reasoned Tacy, why not make deep ecological <and> social vitality possible by revitalizing American agriculture? Why shouldn’t hemp be the vessel through which community health would meet planetary health? “It’s why I’m so in love with this plant,” Tacy enthuses. “Hemp fits the model … of sustainability and regenerative agriculture. It’s the only plant that we know of that can feed, clothe, shelter, and provide medicine.” Tacy sees the big picture. Every hemp farmer I’ve talked with is like that. A certain esprit de corps. A definitive vision of a world filled with better alternatives. Agriculture meets advocacy  Frederick Cawthon ditched his corporate management career in Tennessee but still wields his MBA like the whip of a lion tamer. He’s enticed investors, built a team of veteran growers, and convinced the local college president to open dormant summer dorms to house dozens of H-2A workers from Mexico to work an 85-acre hemp farm near Jackson, TN. He became president of the Tennessee chapter of the Hemp Industries Association to support the trade politically. “Why are we getting licenses from the state to grow hemp?” Cawthon points out. “I don’t need a license to grow corn or soybeans or cotton.” Colorado’s Michael Bowman also has dual roles as a farmer and an advocate. He planted his first hemp field in 2014 and quickly became an activist, lobbying Washington, D.C., officials to legalize hemp. Inside the corridors of power, he was dubbed “Mr. Hemp.” Bowman says seed and chemical companies drive most decisions for corn and soybean farmers—what to plant; when to apply chemicals; where to deliver harvested crops. “What is magic about this plant,” he says of hemp, “is it opens the right side of your brain. You start thinking about all the things you could do with it. You look at all the interesting products and great labels. People really feel more in charge, feel like they really can create with this plant. There’s very little option to do that with the traditional agriculture world.” His son graduated from an agricultural school but didn’t hear the siren song of returning to the family farm in eastern Colorado—until Dad planted hemp. “We’ve got to reinvent ourselves again in these rural areas,” says Bowman, who leads a partnership with 11 hemp farmers in Colorado and New Mexico and is also the founding chair of the U.S. Hemp Growers Association. “This is one way we can do it.” What happens next?  Upstream, hemp farmers see the potential of hemp to nourish people, maintain family farms, and revitalize rural communities. Downstream, they see hemp’s capacity to disrupt every industry that builds everything in your house right now—from building materials and plastics to fuel and medicine. It’s all possible, and it all starts with hemp farmers’ love of their work. “The feeling that you get out there brings me back to my childhood; it’s like being one with nature,” says Cawthon of the times when he gets out in the fields. “There’s a blessing in that silence, because you can think out there—and when you have your hands working on something, there’s a peace that comes from that.”