Victory Hemp Foods shuttered its Exchange Street space at the end of August, sending some equipment back to Kentucky and selling the rest, founder and CEO Chad Rosen told Seven Days. The company makes cold-pressed hemp oil and hemp protein powder.
Rosen said Vermont hemp growers had no interest in growing grain for his products.
“Everyone was all about CBD all throughout the Northeast, even in New York,” Rosen said, referring to cannabidiol, the hemp extract that’s exploded in popularity across the country. “We just never got the critical mass … We just ran into challenge after challenge.”
Rosen said his company expanded to Vermont after discussing a partnership with a group of farmers in the Middlebury area who later invested in the company. Rosen said those farmers promised to grow hemp grain and help him find other suppliers.
But that was nearly two years ago and since then, the siren song of CBD has only grown stronger.
Rosen had the Middlebury space up and running in spring 2018, but a slow start to the growing season and a lack of commitments from farmers forced him to import hemp grain from North Dakota and even Kentucky, where the business is headquartered. That proved “egregiously expensive,” he said, and made little financial sense for “a startup business in this super crazy space of hemp.
Things got even worse when this year’s growing season rolled around, and by July, Rosen had made the decision to pull the plug on a Vermont expansion plan. He gave each of four employees at the facility a month of severance pay and offered them jobs in Kentucky. Chris Bailey, who founded Vermont Smoke & Cure and then joined Victory Hemp as its chief operating officer, will continue to work for the company remotely, according to Rosen.
Rosen’s observations about Vermont’s hemp market were perhaps too on the nose. His former facility is now occupied by Northeast Hemp Commodities, a farming and processing company that extracts — what else? — CBD.
Rye Matthews, the company’s chief technology officer, said they’ll use the space for production and plan eventually to open a small retail shop there, too.
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This article is interesting since the Agency on Agriculture informed the VT Commissioner of Health this summer “that the hemp grown with Joel Bedard was a seed and fiber variety and is generally recognized as safe and perfectly appropriate for animal feed.” “800 pounds of hemp it harvested, according to Hausman, who said the stuff is in her garage. At this point, she said, shell probably donate it to a farm for animal feed. ” At the FDA testimony in DC the head of the the Penn animal food supply said that HEMP [( apart from the seed variety)] is not yet proven safe is “definitely not now in the PENN food supply” ..SO what “cannabis sativa” is being fed to animals in Vermont? https://sevendaysvt-test.newspackstaging.com/OffMessage/arc….
From that FDA website link:
10. Is it legal, in interstate commerce, to sell a food (including any animal food or feed) to which THC or CBD has been added?
A. No. Under section 301 (II) of the FD&C Act [21 U.S.C. 331(II)], it is prohibited to introduce or deliver for introduction into interstate commerce any food (including any animal food or feed) to which has been added a substance which is an active ingredient in a drug product that has been approved under section 505 of the FD&C Act [21 U.S.C. 355], or a drug for which substantial clinical investigations have been instituted and for which the existence of such investigations has been made public.
Please don’t contaminate the human food chain by feeding hemp to livestock. There is some THC in the Hemp. Who knows how that will react in human’s body whenever the livestock is eaten. Will it interfere with any meds the human is already taking? Could some people be super sensitive – like a peanut allergy? It is absorbed and stored in fatty tissues and doesn’t quickly leave our body systems or a livestock’s system. It might not cause any harm for most, but it could be Russian roulette for someone. Please don’t contaminate the human food chain.
Please don’t contaminate the human food chain by feeding hemp to livestock. There is a small amount of THC in Hemp. You don’t know who it might adversely affect. You don’t know what medications a human consumer may be taking and how it could interfere with them.
From that FDA website link:
10. Is it legal, in interstate commerce, to sell a food (including any animal food or feed) to which THC or CBD has been added?
A. No. Under section 301 (II) of the FD&C Act [21 U.S.C. 331(II)], it is prohibited to introduce or deliver for introduction into interstate commerce any food (including any animal food or feed) to which has been added a substance which is an active ingredient in a drug product that has been approved under section 505 of the FD&C Act [21 U.S.C. 355], or a drug for which substantial clinical investigations have been instituted and for which the existence of such investigations has been made public.
Please don’t contaminate the human food chain by feeding hemp to livestock.