Reflections from a Hemp Farmer: Jacob Goldstein and Alejandro Bergad of Green Mountain CBD
Jacob Goldstein and Alejandro Bergad grew up in the same cooperative community in southern New York. They now run a hemp farm in Hardwick.
While a sophomore at UVM, Jacob started an environmentally friendly painting and cleaning business in Burlington that he ran for six years. Alejandro spent seven years homesteading in Vermont prior to being tapped as chief agricultural officer on one of the largest hemp farms in the country, cultivating more than 120 acres. That experience gave Alejandro great insight into the industry and the confidence that he could grow hemp successfully back here in Vermont, with its rich soil and pure water.
A mutual friend reconnected the two men in 2015, and the timing was perfect to start this new venture together. With Alejandro’s extensive farming experience and Jacob’s business acumen, Green Mountain CBD got off the ground—or rather, into the ground—in 2016.
“Our plants have to be hardy enough to survive in northern Vermont’s climate,” Jacob explains. “We put up our first greenhouse during the winter of 2016 while breeding our seeds indoors. We plant out by hand in early June and the games begin. Once the plants are in the ground, the growing season takes about 100 days. It’s a full-out sprint from spring through fall harvest. Well, really all year.”
The men farmed five acres that first year, increased to 15 the second, and in 2018, they’re growing hemp organically on about 50 acres. Their operation now includes four greenhouses that provide 12,000 square feet of growing space, which allowed them to start about 50,000 hemp plants this spring.
Everything happens right in Hardwick: farming, processing, production and distribution of full-spectrum CBD capsules and oils. “We are setting the bar nationally for price and quality of CBD oil,” Jacob notes. “Being the only truly vertically integrated CBD company at our scale allows us to control the quality of our product and to maximize our efficiencies. That allows us to pass the savings on to our customers.”
“We have a great team of about 10 full-time people,” he continues. “All our planting and harvesting is done by hand, which is extremely labor intensive, so we hire a lot of seasonal help in spring and fall. We’re constantly looking for ways to innovate tools and create more efficient methods. We use the flowers, leaves and upper branches from each plant in producing our CBD oil. We recently broke ground on a new drying facility to handle the increased acreage we’re farming this year.”
As for markets, about half of Green Mountain CBD sales are online, and the other half is distributed to approximately 215 stores throughout the country. “Vermont is our most supportive state, naturally,” Jacob says. “There’s been an awesome response here. Vermonters have an awareness about CBD that is unrivalled in the U.S. This buzz is not really surprising in a state so attuned to agriculture. Hemp and CBD-related products have the potential to create jobs and to stimulate the rural economy. The Vermont ‘brand’ is perfectly suited to create value-added products with CBD. We’re already seeing beer, honey, candy, salves and balms.”
Jacob is interested to see how things shake out as acceptance grows across the state and the country. “There’s a great deal of optimism and enthusiasm surrounding hemp, and a lot of people want to get into growing it now. However, the price of hemp has been falling rapidly as the supply increases and the market matures. Some farmers have stockpiles of hemp and aren’t sure what to do with it. Hemp cultivation should be viewed as a business, and you need a plan and a team in place to ascertain your end goal.”
Challenges beyond the actual growing of hemp? “The business climate. At this stage, we have to rely largely on word of mouth to spread awareness about our products. Advertising is difficult because we’re not allowed to promote CBD in traditional markets. We can’t even advertise on Facebook, Instagram or Google. And there’s a ton of misinformation out there. We just hope that Congress can provide some clarity around these issues and remove some of the fog surrounding the CBD industry. We’re optimistic that the recently introduced Hemp Farming Act of 2018 will eliminate many of these barriers for our industry. Since consumers often have a hard time finding legitimate facts about CBD, we recommend people visit ProjectCBD.org, which is a good online resource for information about CBD.”
Because of the wide range of CBD products hitting the market now, it’s hard for stores to curate what they’re offering. Jacob emphasizes that consumers should buy from reputable companies they can trust. “There’s inferior product out there already. We send our CBD oil to three different ISO-accredited labs for analysis on top of doing our own testing, so that gives us multiple levels of confirmation about quality. Consumers shouldn’t hesitate to ask a company to provide testing results.”
Jacob and Alejandro admit that nothing has been easy, but they are constantly inspired by the positive feedback. “People should have access to affordable CBD and not pay an arm and a leg,” says Jacob. “We have developed a proprietary extraction technique. By scaling our processes, we see a clear path to cutting the price of our CBD in and we are all working toward making this vision a reality.” “We have developed a proprietary extraction technique. By scaling our processes, we see a clear path to cutting the price of our CBD in half over the next five years. Our team is motivated by this prospect and we are all working toward making this vision a reality.”
Green Mountain CBD | @greenmountaincbd
Hemp Farming Act of 2018
ProjectCBD.org
