medicinal maneuvers HOW THE VELEZ FAMILY GOT IN EARLY GROWING TEXAS LEGAL HEMP Story by RACHEL STONE | Photography by JESSICA TURNER | Portrait by YUVIE STYLES
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ebra Velez taught her sons to be helpful and humble. She raised two boys in the old Colorado Place Apartments after her husband went to prison because of a marijuana-related crime. The same hands she used to put food on the table, working from home day and night as a seamstress, she now uses to help trim hemp flowers for her son’s budding enterprise. Eddie Velez and his wife, Martha, are among the first crop of legal hemp farmers in Texas. Their company, Oak Cliff Cultivators, has a farm in Brady, Texas, but they were both born and reared in Oak Cliff, and they now live in Kiestwood. “Cannabis has been part of my life since I was a child, good and bad,” Eddie Velez says. He served in the Marine Corps after graduating from Sunset High School, then earned a degree in emergency management from the University of North Texas. A career in that field sent him to the center of natural disasters all around the country, where he coordinated with local authorities on everything from search-and-rescue to restoring power to mosquito control. After 11 years with FEMA, he went to work as a consultant for private firms, where a lobbyist kept him updated on Texas’ impending
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legalization of hemp farming and certain cannabis products. He could see right away that the opportunity was right. “I grew up with a big stigma,” Martha says. “I was like, ‘You don’t do that. Weed is bad.’” But she was sold on cannabis when she started taking it for early onset menopause in 2018 and found that it helped with migraines and sleeping. She had attended Skyline High School’s education magnet because she always knew she wanted to be a teacher. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and was an educator for 16 years in the Irving and Denton school districts. Now she puts education at the forefront of their business. She organizes events to get Oak Cliff Cultivators’ product out there, along with a message about the benefits of legal, medicinal cannabis use. And she’s one of the few who gets to add “local” to that list. Eddie’s mom, Debra, was the last one to be convinced. “She didn’t want anything to do with it because marijuana had devastated her,” Eddie says.
March 6, 2020 Hemp farming became legal in Texas in 2019.
