Business View Magazine November-December 2018

298 299 GLOBAL HEMP GROUP INC. building industry is very environmentally toxic. But with a hemp crop, you can cultivate, process, and build onsite –no cutting of trees and ship- ping of timber and materials from all over. “I got into this after 25 years in the investment management business, because it was a blank slate. It was new, legislatively challenging, and has none of the infrastructure that normal indus- tries have. No matter what education or expertise you have in other industries, you can apply it to hemp.With cannabis, you have medical and recre- ational. Hemp covers almost every other sector. It’s the only plant on earth that can feed, clothe, house, fuel, and medicate society. You don’t really need much more to survive. “Over the next decade, we see the opportunity to transition hemp into different economic sec- tors to allow us to fix what we broke - the envi- ronment, mainly, but our health, as well. Canna- binoids are tremendously beneficial to humans and animals.We produce cannabinoids within our own bodies, like vitamins, just not enough of them to prevent diseases. That’s why we look at cannabinoids as a supplement, not a drug. CBD has no psycho-tropic effect on the brain–you don’t get high, you just feel good. Getting the sci- ence and medicine worlds involved, having them see and validate some of the anecdotal evidence that we’ve already proven, that’s what is getting us excited about what can happen in the future.” BVM: What is GHG actually doing now? Larsen: “We’re growing, cultivating, and pro- cessing hemp, and we’re partnering with compa- nies in other areas. But the facilities we require to process the biomass we’re producing is over- whelming to other industries, because they don’t have capacity to take on the large amount we need to process. In one year, Oregon went from cultivating 2,000 acres to 9,000. Now, everyone in the state is looking for places to dry the material, to extract the cannabinoids, and then there are further phases of decorticating the hemp stalk and separating the fiber (bark) that’s made into textiles and the core that’s made into building materials. There are permanent processing facili- ties, but most have been geared toward cannabis. Now that hemp is on the scene, the capacity of those operations is dwarfing what’s being done in the cannabis industry.” Huber: “In our New Brunswick project, we have a number of farmers contracted to work 125 acres for us. Last year was the first time in 20 years that hemp has been grown in that region. Hemp has been legal as a crop in Canada since the end of the ‘90s; it’s one thing to grow it, but there ha- ven’t been a lot of facilities for processing. The advent of CBD and cannabinoids has changed the focus and you’ll see a lot more farmers involved in Canada and the U.S.– that’s why we’re on both sides of the border.” Larsen: “We have fourth-generation farmers working with us in Oregon. They grow main- ly grass seed and some other crops, but hemp