[A] Hardwick hemp farm has received a $7 million investment and is preparing to double its acreage and employees next year.
Green Mountain CBD, which does its own hemp processing and manufacturing of CBD products, confirmed to VT Digger that One Better Ventures, a Raleigh, North Carolina, venture capital firm, bought a minority stake in the company, which will change its name to Sunsoil in early 2019.
“There’s going to be a very large hemp economy in the country and we really want Vermont to get a good piece of that,” said Alejandro Bergad, co-founder of Green Mountain CBD with Jacob Goldstein and a veteran of the Colorado hemp scene.
CBD, or cannabidiol, is a compound found in hemp that has medical benefits but is not psychoactive.
One Better Ventures played key roles in the growth of Seventh Generation and Burt’s Bees. It was introduced to Green Mountain CBD in April by Heather Beach, a former senior research chemist at Seventh Generation who now serves as vice president of research and development for the Hardwick hemp farm.
“What attracted us to Sunsoil was Alejandro and Jake’s unwavering commitment to product quality,” said Jim Geikie, a partner at One Better Ventures. “They are intentional about everything they do and every detail matters. The market usually rewards this approach.”
In their flannel shirts and jeans, Bergad and Goldstein look more like a couple of slackers than proven farmers and savvy entrepreneurs. The two grew up in Skyview Acres, a cooperative community in Ramapo, New York, formed after World War II as a community that welcomed people of color.
The close-knit cooperative shaped the values of the two boyhood friends. They seem to have inherited the do-it-yourself ethic embraced by Skyview residents who cleared forest for a ball field, built roads and created a swimming pond. Bergad and Goldstein named the holding company for their hemp operation Skyview Naturals.
They are not newcomers to Vermont.
A self-described autodidact, Bergad spent seven years homesteading in Waterbury before moving to Colorado to serve as chief agricultural officer for CBDRx where he supervised a 100-acre hemp farm during the 2015 growing season. Goldstein ran a window-washing business while an undergrad at the University of Vermont and was getting ready to leave Vermont when a mutual friend from Skyview Acres told him that Bergad was looking for a business partner.
Bergad and Goldstein took over the 52-acre Hardwick farm in January 2016. They went right to work that winter breeding seeds indoors. In the spring when it was time to begin planting, they were joined by Dylan McCarthy, a Hardwick resident who Bergad describes as “the Swiss army knife of farm help. He can run and fix anything.” That spring the three hemp farmers felled trees and milled lumber to build greenhouses and tables for seedlings to grow on until they get planted in the fields.
After its first harvest in the fall of 2016, Green Mountain CBD was offered $250,000 by Evergreen Capital Management, a group created to invest in Vermont’s cannabis industry that included Will Raap, the founder of the Gardener’s Supply Co., and Alan Newman, who started Seventh Generation and Magic Hat Brewing. But what Bergad called “differences in vision” nixed the deal before it was consummated.
In 2017 and 2018 three additional greenhouses, a pair of 2,400 square-foot production buildings and a two-story, 20,000-square foot drying facility have been erected on the Hardwick property.
The farmhouse that already stood on the farm when Bergad and Goldstein took it over initially served as the company’s office and seed breeding space, as well as Goldstein’s living quarters for the first two years of the farm’s existence.
“It was kind of special waking up at the farm every day, and I kind of miss having no commute,” said Goldstein, who now lives in Morristown. This fall the Hardwick hemp farmers opened an office on Lake Street in Burlington. According to Bergad, the company currently has a full-time staff of 20.
During the hemp harvest this fall it employed dozens of auxiliary workers. The company plans to double its growing area next year to 100 acres, all in Hardwick and Hyde Park, where it has leased land from High Mowing Seeds. Bergad said part of the One Better Ventures investment will be used to purchase a 300-acre spread to grow more hemp, perhaps in the Champlain Valley. That farm would see its first hemp crop planted in the spring of 2020 and is expected to provide jobs for 80 seasonal workers.
It is likely that the company will move its pill-making operation to the Champlain Valley as well, according to Bergad. The Hardwick farm has not used the carbon-dioxide extraction process for pulling CBD from hemp, which is widely used in Vermont’s hemp industry and requires expensive lab gear. But Green Mountain CBD has invested in other high-tech equipment, such as robots that make 20 mg capsules filled with coconut oil and CBD and a production line that fills plastic bottles with capsules and attaches labels to them.
Bergad and Goldstein re-purposed 70-gallon stainless steel double boilers normally used for honey production to pressure cook their CBD/coconut oil concoction for 16 hours or longer. They declined a request to photograph larger, custom-made tanks that are part of their production process.
The investment from One Better Ventures has confirmed what hemp evangelists have been saying since Vermont legalized hemp cultivation in 2014: that the crop could offer a new path for Vermont agriculture.
“Seeing that kind of money put into Vermont is a validation of this industry and an illustration of the strength of the Vermont brand,” said Carl Christianson, CEO of Northeast Processing, the Brattleboro-based start-up in its first year of operation and reportedly the state’s largest hemp processing lab.
This summer Green Mountain CBD’s hemp, but not its CBD products, was certified as organic by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The company is in the process of filing for B corporation status as a social benefit company. It has vowed to cut its price in half over the next five years.
Referring to CBD’s purported effectiveness for a variety of bodily woes, Bergad said, “We take care of plants that take care of people.” And after the harvest in late September, Goldstein declared, “It’s humbling to work with a plant like this and to farm the land.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story referred incorrectly to the Green Mountain CBD product that was certified as organic by the USDA. It was the firm’s hemp, not its CBD.
