Joel Bedard, Hemp Hero

Hemp may grow like a weed, but it takes significant intellectual and financial capital to get hemp from seed to field to shelf, plate or glass. Joel Bedard, founder and CEO of the Vermont Hemp Company, works with farmers and other business partners to bridge those challenges. An engaging agroecologist with an encyclopedic knowledge of rules and regulations, Bedard is dedicated to unlocking the myriad potentials of one of our nation’s oldest cultivated crops. We sat down for an hour conversation over a beer and stood up three hours later…

For all its benefits, why is hemp so controversial?

Hemp was identified as a national security food product—a vital food source—by Bill Clinton’s administration back in the ’90s. It’s hard to fathom that we are still battling to get seeds and to grow and process it 25 years later. We import 75% of Canada’s hemp. We should be growing that domestically.

However, much of the public confuses hemp with marijuana and doesn’t understand it’s the non-psychoactive cousin. Hemp contains cannabinoids, or CBD, whereas pot contains THC. Hemp farming isn’t the same as growing marijuana. It’s not snip, trim and bag the buds and make a wad of cash. To enter this arena, you have to understand the basics of taxation, legalities and ethics. To go from seed to a bottle of tincture or marketable shelf-stable product requires hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment not to mention technical capabilities and knowledge. There’s a false narrative out there that you can make a ton of fast money growing hemp.

How did you get to where you are today?

I grew up in New Hampshire and graduated from UVM in 1990. I had a self-designed major in the College of Ag that allowed me to study plant and soil sciences, resource economics, forestry, geology and environmental science. After college, I worked field and lab jobs with natural resources and fisheries, primarily in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve always been interested in engineering, so I moved back to New England and worked in IT for 15 years until I started Vermont Hemp in 2014.

Explain the genesis of Vermont Hemp Company.

The 2014 federal Farm Bill allowed for the cultivation of industrial hemp within certain parameters. Vermont Hemp Company is a pharmaceutical research firm, and we have all the levels of compliance and permitting in place. We don’t have an indoor cultivation facility; we focus on applied research and development. Dr. Brian Voigt, a research professor at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at UVM, and I decided to partner on some projects. He’s a worldclass mathematician and an economist, so we study pollen drift, microclimate modeling, tech innovation, proprietary harvesting devices, extraction methods and pharmacological protocols. We know what will grow best and how to harvest and process it.

Describe the services you provide.

We’re a farmer-facing organization. We offer genetics, consulting, advice about compliance and guidance on cultivation, processing, marketing and more. Two dozen farms are currently working with us in Vermont alone. Rye Matthews is our operations manager, and we’re trying to do as much as we can for as many people as we can. Hemp is labor intensive. Right now planting and harvesting are mostly manual and not terribly efficient. We’re coming up with solutions. NOFA VT has been extremely helpful, and Heather Darby and her team at UVM’s Northwest Crop Program do a phenomenal job. They are pure scientists performing agronomic studies. Their research helps advance the prospects for everyone.

What are some of your products and projects?

We work with Kimball Brook Farm and Green Mountain Organic Creamery to produce our own brand of CBD chocolate milk, iced tea and hemp butter. J.D. and Cheryl DeVos have been terrific partners in this process. We’re also developing some maple products.

We’ve partnered with Stone Corral Brewery in Richmond. We supply the hemp flowers and they hemp, as opposed to hop, a beer called Saisanja. Hops and hemp are different genuses of the Cannabaceae family, and both have piney, citrusy flavors. We also supply hemp flowers to Green Empire Brewing of Colchester for their Chill Session beer, and Prohibition Pig will have a 420 special menu with some of our product.