Father and daughter team looks to capitalize on industrial hemp
By Patrick Wagner
STERLING, Colo. — While Colorado marijuana farmers have been flourishing, the state-legal hemp industry struggles to have enough seeds to transition from novelty to full-fledged agricultural commodity. Now the state has seen the crop through a handful of harvests but has yet to fully realize the potential of the wonder-plant.
The father-daughter team of Bill and Danielle Billings saw the hemp resurgence as a way to break the chain of low-income farming in Colorado and formed the Colorado Hemp Project together.
“The people want change,” Danielle Billings said. “The farmers want a life and to be able to feed their family without stress.”
Danielle Billings had the network connections to start the crop, and her father brought the experience of managing a farm and working the Coloradan soil.
Still, the story of Colorado Hemp Project remains similar to hemp businesses in other states: seeds are vital and scarce. Even without the DEA looming overhead, it’s a challenge for farmers to acquire seeds in the abundance needed to develop a viable industry.
“Obtaining seed is our biggest challenge,” Billings said. “We could be growing hundreds of thousands of acres, however, we don’t have the seed stock for it.”
The Billings farm is located in Sterling, Colorado, where the family is producing CDB products, as well as dedicating their efforts biomass/biodynamic companies and start-up projects, she said. They’ve also worked to provide several farms with seeds for 2015. Part of the company’s mission is to see industrial hemp return as a national force. This is directly inspired by the Billingses’ shared connection with the farming community in the Midwest.
Danielle Billings describes her father as a “farmer at heart” who was tired of seeing other farms he was working with suffer from low profits. Together they formed the Colorado Hemp Project in 2013, but the actual farming operation didn’t start until the plant was legal in Colorado a year later.
So far, the Colorado Hemp Project has remained small in scale, but plans are in place to expand.
“We didn’t start this company to be small,” Danielle Billings said.
The company’s first commercial success came when the Colorado Hemp Project’s line of body products, Nature’s Root was picked up by Whole Foods and other distributors.
This year will see the Colorado Hemp Project’s third and fourth harvests come to fruition and the company plans to slowly take the market back for hemp farmers in th