FROM HAYFIELDS TO HEMP

Breathing new life into old farmland

Jacob Zieminski lived and breathed agriculture as a child growing up on a dairy farm in Cheshire. His first job was taking care of his cousin’s cows after his family’s enterprise succumbed to economic pressure and went dormant.

Not many years later, while earning a degree in management and finance at Providence College, Zieminski began a relationship with marijuana, using it to ease anxiety and his ADD. After graduation, and over the next two decades, his cannabis usage became less pronounced, but he became deeply exposed to medical marijuana and its revolutionary impact on healthcare.

Zieminski appreciated the cannabis industry so much that in 2019, a year after passage of the Farm Bill, he and his brother, Justin, breathed new life into the family farm, adding craft CBD hemp crops—a variety of cannabis—to the property’s hay fields, vegetables, raspberry vines and apple orchards.

As of January, CAVU Hemp was one of 47 hemp license holders in Massachusetts, and Jacob Zieminski was one of only 16 farmers to hold a dual license to both grow and process the plant, which allows him to sell product to dispensaries. He sits on the leadership council for the Mass Hemp Association, and he’s pleased to have combined two of his main passions in life.

But he—and many other hemp farmers across the state—are worried about the future of the crops here. Hemp farmers are battling everything from strict regulations to the difficulty of growing the plant, a rapidly shrinking per-pound cost, product coming from out of state illegally and market limitations. Also, the 2018 legislation expires in September and must be renegotiated.

Legislation pending in the Senate—bill S1900—would offer some relief; an agency would be created to oversee the Cannabis Control Commission, and that entity would have enforcement power to ensure that only Massachusetts farmers could sell CBD Hemp to Massachusetts dispensaries. Two additional bills, SD598 and HD1509, would also establish hemp and its derivatives as agricultural products that could be sold at farmer’s markets across the state.

“It will be a while before these measures come up for a vote,” said Julia Agron, the president of the Northeast Sustainable Hemp Association and an active member of the Mass Hemp Coalition, the latter group of which is lobbying actively at a grass roots level for passage of these bills. (The association is a nonprofit and is prohibited from lobbying.)

ONE FARMER’S STORY IS A TYPICAL ONE

Agron is the HR manager of a cannabis farm in Whately that was once a fertile ground for asparagus. She also holds a license to grow on the undera-half-acre backyard farm in Amherst she owns with her husband, Navid Hatfield.

She explained that the high cost of a license here—at $500 per year for a dual license, or $300 to cultivate or process—is only one deterrent. A rigid regulation dictates that if the THC level rises above .3 percent, farmers licensed to grow hemp only must destroy their crops because, at over .3 percent THC, the plant is considered to be marijuana and must be destroyed.

And there are also problems with bringing cannabis/hemp to market; growers here are competing with farmers across the country, many of whom have 10,000-acre fields and a much longer growing season.

“Cannabis became a commodity,”

Agron said. “We all thought it would sell for $100 a pound, and it did for about a second. Now, farmers might get $10 per pound.”

In addition, after the Farm Bill passed in 2018 and farmers began growing, the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR) announced a year later that cannabis and CBD products were not a food and could not be sold, and growers couldn’t sell to dispensaries until the Survive and Thrive amendment passed in 2020.

Selling to dispensaries is also not without problems. Growers must pay to process and package their product, further reducing profits.

“We couldn’t make any money,” Agron said. “We all bought licenses to grow tomatoes, but then we were told that we could only sell the tomatoes to the ketchup factory. We can’t sell to the public.”

Because of the limitations and restrictions, Agron simply grows for herself and family and friends. She hopes one day to sell plant and her products at farmer’s markets and tell the story of her natural backyard farm with its charming goats.

What she has gotten out of her cannabis-growing experience are lessons in

Brothers In Farming

Justin Zieminski moved back to the family farm before Jacob, working the fields, beginning to grow hay again and building a single-family home on the 75-acre property. Jacob joined his brother in 2018 after 18 years in corporate healthcare.

When Jacob returned, he worked with the University of Massachusetts Department of Agriculture on soil testing, discovered the farmland was still fertile and began to grow cannabis.

Putting his dual growing and processing license to use, he uses a propriety, solventless method to transform the live flower into varying grades of bubble hash and then creates products such as tinctures, lotions and ingestibles. “This process is laborious and time-consuming, but the output is one of the highest grades of cannabis and is hands down the freshest option on the market,” he said.

In the Zieminskis’ first growing season in 2019, they grew about a thousand pounds of CBD Hemp, increasing the harvest each year to over 2,000 pounds. In 2021, Zieminski grew a strain from a breeder in Oregon—“the most beautiful plants I’ve ever grown”— but he lost 75 percent of the crop to disease in the fall, learning the hard way that the plant doesn’t grow well in the Northeast.

politics and the passage of legislation; she is on speaking terms with state Sen. Jo Comerford.

Agron will push hard for passage of all pending legislation, but she has been in this fight since 2019 and said she has only this one last battle left in her. “I really believe in this plant. I’m passionate about it,” she said. “But it’s not worth the cost of pursuing a hemp license if you’re just doing it for yourself when you can grow cannabis in Mass. for personal use without a license or regulatory oversight.”

In 2022, after passage of Survive and Thrive, the brothers began selling to a wholesale client in southeastern Massachusetts, a dispensary. While the effort became more profitable, the brothers knew it would not be profitable enough, and they began to diversify, also growing tomatoes, Brussel sprouts, beets and carrots.

“Should hemp be able to drive a farm? Yes,” Zieminski said. “But we’re at a stage in the development of the market that, by diversifying, we’re managing our risk. If hemp crashes, and there’s a drought in California, we can make money on tomatoes. We’re trying to be smart in that sense. We’re really looking at this to be strategically diversified and connected to the community.”

Tips For Home Growers

When marijuana was legalized in Massachusetts, Zieminski began growing for himself—tipping a hoe into the complicated industry.

His efforts began with indoor growing, but that came with the added cost of energy to run the grow lights. He got involved with an energy group sponsored by the CCC and studying energy consumption and sustainability, which all led him to growing outdoors.

“There’s nothing more powerful than the sun,” he said.

He added, “Everyone should grow,” and he highly recommends that users, or those experimenting, begin to grow as an option to buying product from a dispensary. “It’s a great way to discover what works for you versus going to a dispensary, which is expensive,” he said. “Once you find something, it will probably be worth it; growing at home can save thousands per year.”

He offers these tips for first-time cannabis home-growers: Study up. Before you begin tilling soil, learn as much as you can about cannabis farming using online resources and courses that might be offered at area community colleges. Zieminski learned about growing by attending sessions offered by the New England Cannabis Conventions, which hosts a series of industry events across the region. The Massachusetts event was held in Boston on March 10, but there is a convention in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 20-21 and in Burlington, Vermont, on May 6-7. “That’s how I learned,” Zieminski said. “I got curious. I went to these conventions and saw what companies were doing and what was out there. You’re affectively teaching yourself to be a scientist on some level. You learn about nutrients the plants need and when they need them in the growing season.” For convention details, visit https:// necann.com/.

Study up on various plant genetics. “If you get bad seeds, you can’t grow great plants,” he said.

Grow within the limits of the law. Home growers are allowed six plants per person or 12 per household, and if the grower holds a medical marijuana card, he or she may grow more.

Buy your seeds or seedlings online, or look for clones at your local dispensary. Zieminski recommends ETHOS Genetics in Colorado, a small family-owned business. For growing CBD, he uses Oregon CBD, which is also a small operation led by two brothers. If there are dispensaries in your area, you can ask if they sell clones—or cuttings from live marijuana plants.

To follow the work of the Mass Hemp Coalition and its lobbying efforts, visit https://www.facebook.com/MassHempCoalition/