Marijuana Farming
Farming is one of the oldest businesses on Earth. Every caveman and cavewoman needed to eat but not all of them knew how to grow food. So, farming has persisted to feed yourself plus get paid to feed others. But like all other businesses, farming needs to adapt to changing times: the types of food consumers want to buy plus the costs of producing that food.
Two sisters running the family farm are now (literally) betting the farm on weed.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Twin sisters Amy and Gail Hepworth were born on a farm in New York state’s Hudson Valley, which had been run by their family for over 150 years. Their father was involved in farming daily while their mother, who knew nothing about farming, managed the household while raising their twin girls.
CHILDHOOD
By 1960 when the twin sisters were born, the family farm business had transformed into a 900-acre fruit farm and the entire family was involved, making a good living selling apples wholesale to supermarkets all over the country.
But the family’s good fortunes began to change in 1972 when Gail and Amy were teenagers. Their father took off, leaving their mother – a college music major who longed for a career outside agriculture – with five children and a farm to run. She surprised everyone by making a success of things, scaling back the wholesale apple production as that business became less profitable and focusing instead on the family’s more lucrative retail farm stand. She sold off some farmland and used the proceeds to help pay for her children to go to college.
EDUCATION
Amy enrolled in Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where she encountered new organic and low-chemical farming methods that inspired her to return to the family farm, where she shifted the farm’s focus to more ecologically sustainable practices.
BASIC PRODUCTION – ORGANIC PRODUCE
(Terms defined: “Organic” farming involves production without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or other artificial agents. “Produce” is a general term for many farm-produced crops, including fruits and vegetables. Grains and oats are also sometimes considered ‘produce’, which is a term implying that the products are fresh and generally in the same inside and outside status as where and when they were harvested.)
A family farm, in its fundamental nature, is a changeable and ever-changing operation. Fields turn over from one crop to the next; markets evolve; new generations make their mark.
Not much is known about the farm’s first 100 years but by 1918, the Hepworths were running a roadside stand selling vegetables and fruit juices to tourists.
Following college graduation, Amy was the first sister to join the family business, followed several years later by Gail, who concluded her first career in biomedical engineering to return to the family business. Gail used her corporate experience to help expand the farm to its current size.
Hepworth now cultivates more than 200 varieties of vegetables across its 500 acres; it is one of the largest organic tomato growers in the Northeast. Whole Foods and FreshDirect are major customers, as well as several other food distributors.
By 2023, in the organic vegetable world, Hepworth Farms, in Milton, N.Y. was a regional ‘power player’ – a name brand in everything from lettuces to leeks, and the rare grower that has managed to combine farmers’ market purity with serious scale. Hepworth’s produce graces community-supported agriculture boxes and is beloved by the discerning members of food coops in New York City. The farm also supplies supermarkets and restaurants across the Northeast; in peak season, Hepworth moves 15,000 cases of produce every day.
“Amy’s way of farming is very expensive,” Gail explained (with a smile). Profits on their vegetables have always been slim and lately, as costs for everything from transportation to labor to packaging have surged, they have gotten even slimmer.
A BUSINESS CHANGE MAY OR MAY NOT BE SUCCESSFUL – PERHAPS JUMP IN ONLY UP TO YOUR ANKLES TO START
The sisters’ first try to add a new farming product involved ‘hemp’, like marijuana it is a variety of cannabis, cultivated for its fiber and for cannabidiol, or ‘CBD’, used to treat anxiety, insomnia, and epilepsy. (Hemp does not contain tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, that gives marijuana its psychoactive properties). The federal government made growing hemp legal in 2018, sparking a nationwide rush among farmers.
Growing the hemp plant was an appealing prospect for the Hepworth sisters, both because CBD oil was fetching handsome prices and because hemp was known to improve soil health and sequester carbon. So, like many other farmers, they dove headlong into the market, planting 200 (of their 500) acres of hemp in 2019, plus investing extensively in machinery to extract CBD, while producing their own line of Hepworth-branded CBD products.
But the CBD market crashed almost immediately. “When we started the harvest, the price was $35 a pound for hemp biomass,” Gail said, “and when we ended, it was 35 cents.” The hemp crop had been overplanted across the country and demand had not kept up with supply. By 2020, much of the farm’s wealth was sunk into 2,000 liters of CBD concentrate that was worth only a fraction of what the sisters had been counting on.
ADDING A NEW PRODUCT – MARIJUANA
Grappling with the shrinking profitability of vegetable farming, and in a financial hole from their hemp foray, the sisters in March 2023 applied for, and received, one of more than 200 conditional cannabis cultivator licenses that New York State handed out to farmers in 2022, a year after the sale of recreational marijuana was legalized in that state. With the right strategy and a little luck, the Hepworths thought growing and selling marijuana could be the missing piece of their financial puzzle.
Instead of jumping into producing a new product by devoting another 200 acres as they had done with hemp, the sisters limited their first-year acreage for marijuana production to only 10. But that number does not fully reflect how much is riding on the success of this new undertaking. The Hepworth sisters’ investment t in marijuana goes far beyond land: they are not just growing it; they have a license to process it too, for which they have already spent almost $8 million, investing in a state-of-the-art laboratory and processing equipment. They have hired a chemist, a plant virologist, marketing and sales executives, and a small army of administrators to keep up with the mountain of compliance work cannabis requires.
The payoff, they hope, will be a crop lucrative enough for the farm to continue supporting the family into the next generation, as it has since 1818.
CHALLENGES RELATED TO MARIJUANA PRODUCTION
Cannabis is a notoriously fussy crop, requiring frequent feeding, trimming, tending and inspection to avoid issues like mildew and pest damage. Across the U.S., it is grown primarily indoors, where farmers can control variables like light, temperature, airflow, and humidity. But Amy finds that arrangement repugnant. The plant “wants to be free,” she said, and it can reach its fullest potential only in natural sun and living soil. “It is a plant, and it belongs in agriculture,” she continued. “People say you can’t grow it outside. Well, I beg to differ.” While defending her strategy, Amy held up a fat flower glistening with resin to prove that her plants were thriving without the help of LED lights, which are used indoors and produce harmful emissions, she said.
Growing, processing, and selling cannabis involves multiple risks and challenges, including:
- The plant isn’t easy to grow. “It’s the most labor-intensive plant on our planet,” said one consultant. “It must be regularly pruned and de-leafed, as well as inspected for mold, mildew, and insects. Caterpillars can be an issue, as well as aphids and spider mites, all of which seem to love marijuana as much as humans.
- Because the drug is federally illegal, it cannot cross state lines, meaning cannabis sold in New York state must be grown in the same state, too.
- Due to a shortage of local labor, many farms rely on foreign workers with federal H-2A visas to tend their crops, but these visa holders are not permitted to handle marijuana.
- Security for the crops – to prevent plant thefts – required Hepworth Farms to provide 24-hour video surveillance and human guards.
REDUCE BUSINESS RISKS BY PARTNERING
Even with their background in hemp, the sisters knew that to be players in the cannabis market, they needed specific expertise. So, in May 2023, they partnered with Pura Industries, a cannabis company which specializes in so-called ultra-premium or artisan cannabis products, brought to the table with decades of experience from the California market and a library of more than 200 cannabis varieties.
Their new partners selected 16 cultivars for Hepworth Pura’s first crop, based on market demand and suitability for the local growing conditions. But still, growing cannabis remains “a bit of a guessing game.”
Hepworth Farm uses their (expensive) equipment to process not just their own harvest but also those of other growers in the region. With their partner, they are developing more than 100 retail products, some of which will feature the Hepworth and Pura names together or separately. The hope is that Hepworth’s recognized brand name in vegetables – which stands for quality and sustainability – will translate for New York’s marijuana buyers.
CAREER SATISFACTION
This family career story of potential success in farming by adding a significantly different product while understanding its risks and challenges, is still being written.
“This plant is so abundant, there’s just not the need to be greedy,” said sister Gail. “People who are greedy will ruin the industry. And believe me, they’re coming so we must work hard to hold our own.”
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This career story is based on a news article written by Elizabeth G. Dunn, published by The New York Times newspaper on February 19, 2023, plus internet research.
