Lyndonville-Hemp Harvesting is happening around Vermont and the Northeast Kingdom. As fall is coming to an end, farmers and hemp distributors alike are cashing in on their efforts.
Hemp is a canabis plant, which is used exclusively for industrial uses and products. Hemp is more commonly used for turning the flowering of the plant into CBD oil. CBD oil is a canabinoid oil. Preliminary studies on CBD oil has found it can be beneficial for anxiety, cognition, pain, and other movement disorders. Also, the stem of a hemp plant can be used to make rope, strong fabrics, and paper too.
Happy Hill Maple Farms of Lyndonville grew hemp for the first time this year. They used twenty acres to grow their crop, and brought the seedlings for it from a company in Winooski. It took only ninety days to grow their hemp from the seedlings. With the help of friends and their family making the work light, Happy Hill was able to harvest all their hemp in five days. Since their hemp harvest, Happy Hill has shipped their crop back to where they got the seedlings from, in Winooski. Their hemp harvest is now in the process of being turned into CBD oil. Despite never harvesting hemp before, Happy Hill found the process easy and not too difficult to learn how to do.
"What we ended up doing to conserve a lot of more space is taking all of the branches, and running them through a hay bailer. This alllowed us to get more compacted in the small area we were working with." said Michael Johnson, a Farm Manager at Happy Hill Maple Farms.
"Its hard to say just how much hemp we will grow next year, as we are a Maple Farm, but we hope to harvest another twenty acres of hemp crops next fall and in the future we want to also start using hemp in our maple products". Johnson said.
Farmers aren't the only ones getting into the expanding hemp industry in Vermont either. Local CBD stores and distributors are getting in on the action too. Green Mountain Grow Store of Lyndonville has partenered with hemp farmers and distributors the past few years, in order to provide better CDB and hemp products for their customers.
"There are some farms in southern Vermont that grow hemp and we have partnered with them for our CBD products. In the future we might relocate our store to southern Vermont, to be nearer a larger CBD market. Its really interesting to see how far hemp and CBD products have expanded in New England in just the past few years. You used to just think of Colorado as the only profitable hemp market, but now Vermont and New Engalnd are able to have a profitable buisness for hemp as well." said Ray Dauphinais owner of Green Mountain Grow Store.
Its hard to say where hemp will go from here in the coming years, but places like Happy Hill and Green Mountain Grow anticipate expanding their connections with hemp further in the future, especailly with CBD products.