After thirty plus years in the industry, Chris Boucher knows a thing or two about hemp. These days he’s the CEO of Farmtiva, a California-based hemp company that specializes in consulting, seed sales, and a hemp juice powder called JuiceTiva, but his journey with hemp started long before the Farm Bill created the pathway for the modern hemp industry.
He started a business in 1990 called the Hempstead Co. that made hemp wallets, hats, bags and such.
“Back then the only place you could get hemp was either in China, Hungary, Romania or Poland. And so I went over to China in ’92, and we sourced the hemp there,” he said during this week’s episode.
Boucher wanted to source his hemp in the U.S., and so in 1994 he secured permission from the USDA and became the first person to grow hemp in the U.S. in decades. But before the crop was harvested, local narcotics agents in California destroyed it by plowing it under, and the dream of U.S.-grown hemp had to wait.
Along the way he also co-founded the Hemp Industries Association, wrote an influential legal opinion about CBD, and imported the first CBD oil into the U.S.
He traces his career in hemp back to a chance encounter in 1990 when he was asked to sign a petition to legalize hemp by a man who had just published a book that explained the history and potential of hemp. That man was Jack Herer, author of the seminal hemp book “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” The two became lifelong friends.
As the current director of the California Hemp Growers Guild, an advocacy group for hemp farmers, Boucher sees first hand the detrimental effect recent state legislation is having on California's hemp farmers.
He said it’s a big win for the marijuana industry and a big loss for the hemp industry. Hemp now falls under the jurisdiction of the California Bureau of Cannabis Control instead of the California Department of Agriculture.
Boucher said that the agency’s fee structure and regulations make it nearly impossible for hemp farmers to compete, and many have stopped growing hemp altogether.
“We’ve lost 90% of hemp farmers in California. We went from 800 farmers down to 120,” he said.
He said these new regulations will also make it very expensive for any out-of-state hemp companies wishing to do business in California.
Also in this episode, host Eric Hurlock reads a summary of the new definition of hemp set forth in the recently introduced Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act, Chuck Schumer's bill to federally legalize cannabis.
Be sure to check out all of these links. And there is a transcript of the interview below.
https://www.farmtiva.com/juicetiva-hemp-juice-powder
Chris Boucher plants hemp in 1994: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC5HQvl8jKU
Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act Summary
https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/caoa_overview_summary1.pdf
Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act Summary of Revisions
https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/capa_revisions_summary.pdf
Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act full bill
https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/caoa_final_introduction.pdf
Johnson & Johnson asks FDA to ‘chip away’ at cannabinoid regulations
California Bureau of Cannabis Control
https://www.bcc.ca.gov/
Penn State's Hemp Scouting Pest Report
https://www.lancasterfarming.com/farming/several-pests-sighted-in-hemp-fields/article_0ebb4a46-4513-5106-85e6-62d099a9e47c.html
Penn State's Hemp Research Field Walk
https://web.cvent.com/event/3b269a07-6c81-4d08-bc89-d3a22cba8785/summary
Thanks to our generous sponsors
Music by Tin Bird Shadow
https://tinbirdshadow.bandcamp.com/releases
Read a transcript of the interview with Chris Boucher:
Eric Hurlock: Chris Boucher, CEO of Farmtiva. Welcome to the Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast. How are you doing?
Chris Boucher: I'm doing great, Eric. Thank you for inviting me on your podcast.
Eric Hurlock: Absolutely. This is quite an honor. You know, you have quite a reputation in the hemp space, one of the early pioneers. So I wonder first, if you could just sort of give our listeners an introduction, and then, we'll get into some of those interesting stories.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, great. Well, we can date stamp it. You know, I started my first hemp company in 1990. It was called the Hempstead Company. We became one of the largest hemp companies probably in the world with 4000 stores in 15 different countries all throughout the nineties. We made hemp wallets, hemp bags, hemp hats. And back then, the only place you could get hemp was either in China or Hungary, Romania or Poland. And so, I went over to China in '92, and we sourced the hemp there. But my real roots in the beginning was I was in a store in Van Nuys, California, and I had been making cotton backpacks at the time, 1990. A gentleman asked me to sign a hemp petition, and I did not know what hemp was. I said, 'What is hemp?' And he turned around and said, 'This is what hemp is. I'm an author of a book I wrote. We're trying to legalize hemp in California. I'd like your signature, and I can explain to you what hemp is.' 6 hours later, I left the store. The guy's name was Jack Herer, and he took me through each chapter, and it basically changed my life. Everything I knew in school, pretty much, I wanted to say it was a lie, but they just took out all the information. From that moment on, I was like, 'Let's change the world. This is the greatest environmental product commodity ever grown.' And it was American. It was really the roots of American, how we were successful in commerce and global commerce and shipping and so forth and so on. So I started a hemp company, and we just really wanted to bring hemp back to America. If you look at my old ads, we used to say Made in America, because we would buy the fabrics from the Chinese, from the Hungarians and the Romanians. But we cut and sewed it in California. We wanted to have some type of Americans touching it and sewing it, so we could put Made in America. Then, one day, I decided in 1994, 'Let's grow it in America.' I went to the USDA in Brawley, California, and I explained to them what I was doing, and I showed them all the information, and they actually had contacts in Washington, D.C., and they actually had permission to grow hemp from the 1940s. It was still on their books. So we grew a couple acres of hemp in 1994 in California. Everyone said, 'You'll never, ever do it. You're crazy.' And it just kind of pushed me to do it and became the first American to grow hemp since really World War Two. And we grew it; unfortunately it was cut down by the local police for the THC levels. There was no recognition, at the time, of 0.3.
Eric Hurlock: Right. You were the first Americans to grow hemp, but also the first American to get shut down by the local narcotics officers.
Chris Boucher: Yeah. And they didn't want to charge us. I mean, we had permits and contracts from the USDA. We had permits from the local agricultural commissioner. And so that really pushed everything in motion for legislation, legalization of hemp, and it was a conduit. Moving forward from '94, we just didn't stop. We continued. Then in '99-2000, the DEA just really saw the hemp industry exploding, and they decided to reinterpret the congressional hemp laws. And their reinterpretation was that Congress never really meant for people to have hemp. It was they didn't know what they were doing, basically. So the DEA sent letters to all the stores, especially if you made hemp lotions, hemp creams. This is pre-CBD. This was just hemp seed oil. And they tried to outlaw hemp seeds and hemp seed oil, and they started seizing my containers. We became one of the largest importers of seeds and seed oil in '99-2000. We actually ended up suing the DEA. It's a landmark case called the HIA versus the DEA. It took about three or four years. We won in 2004 in the ninth Court of Appeals. And the judges basically told the DEA, 'You guys don't make laws. If you don't like the hemp law, you need to go to Congress because they're the ones that make laws and have them change the law.' Well, obviously they didn't, but it really snuffed the industry out for years to come. Then, of course, in about 2011, I was hired by a company in San Diego, hemp meds and cannabis, and I was asked to help draft a legal opinion. I'm not a lawyer, but I've been involved in every piece of hemp legislation in California--probably eight different pieces of legislation since '95. And I co-drafted an opinion called Hemp CBD is legal in all 50 states, and I was actually kicked out of the Hemp Industries Association, which I'm one of the co-founders. I didn't explain that in my history, but I founded the HIA, Hemp Industries Association, with three other people in 1992, not '94 but '92. And so they just didn't understand it. And a lot of the hemp groups were like, you know, 'This is fraud. There's no such thing as CBD.' And we explained to them, 'Hey, it's the main constituent in hemp. It's what makes hemp and marijuana different.' You know, the ratio of CBD to THC, they're opposites. So we wrote that legal opinion, and at the time, I was farming about 1000 hectares in the Czech Republic, and we were growing fiber strains, and we were taking the tops of the fiber strains that were about 6-7% CBD. And we're pelletizing them, and we were making CBD oil, and we imported it to the United States. So we were the first people to import like 500 kilos of raw hemp CBD paste. We cleared U.S. Customs; we cleared Homeland Security. I mean, I thought I might go to jail if they seized it and said, 'What is this?' But, you know, we used the the harmonized tariff codes, the United States harmonized tariff codes, underneath hemp oil, cannabis sativa. So it's completely legal. And we just would put the legal opinion inside the packages of hemp oil we were sending across the country in case the feds or the police seized it when they would open the box. It was a five page legal opinion saying hemp CBD is legal. So anyways, fast forward. By 2013-'14, everyone started copying our legal opinion and saying, 'We're going to do this too' because it was like striking gold. That's really how the industry, the business industry, started. Of course, CBD was around with Ringo and in Humboldt County, California, with the breeding back in 2005-'06. But the real commerce started when our legal opinion, we were able to import it in the United States and distribute it and sell it underneath U.S. Harmonized Tariff Codes. A lot of people don't know there's several harmonized tariff codes called True Hemp, the original name of hemp, United States government was true hemp. And that's what we used to call it. But unfortunately, we had some issues and people called it industrial hemp, which we didn't want. So long story short, that was one battle we lost in the beginning. We called it the true hemp industries.
Eric Hurlock: Yeah, I'm curious about that. What did you have against the name industrial hemp?
Chris Boucher: Well, because hemp started as an environmental movement. We wanted to clean up the soil. We could do the fiber, the fabrics and oil and food, and it was one of the best environmental crops we knew of compared to any other crop that existed. So a group of people, people that I knew, liked the name industrial. And to us, it sounded like a toxic, polluting name--industrial. It doesn't sound environmental. And we're a democracy, so sometimes you lose. You know, your opinion gets snuffed out, so true hemp died in 1992. That's when we started the Hemp Industries Association. The first year there were only six of us, and then by the following year, in '94, we invited about 100 people across the country for our annual meeting, and they voted it out, and we lost. They didn't want to use the name True Hemp Industries Association. They changed it to the Hemp Industries Association. But again, that's another whole battle that took place early on during the development of the United States modern hemp revolution, we'll call it.
Eric Hurlock: Sure. You said around the time of your legal opinion that that was maybe the cause of the division that got you booted out of the HIA.
Chris Boucher: Yeah the HIA the vote hemp, and I know these people--I've known him for 20 years--and they just didn't believe or understand. I think once people were educated, they realized, well, wait a sec, he is correct. Cannabidiol is not in the controlled substance, the CSA. It's not federally illegal. There's no mention of it. So how could it be illegal if there's no mention of cannabidiol? That's cannabinoids, and THC is mentioned. So we took that route, and Mike Llamas, who was the founder of the Hemp Meds, he was a younger guy. At first I was skeptical. But once I saw the analogy, it would be like having oranges and grapefruits, and someone says, well, grapefruits are illegal, and oranges are legal, but they're both in the citrus family. So the laws are based on, as Jack Herer taught me, wordsmithing. You know, you have to be a linguist to really understand what these words and how powerful they are and what they mean. So we were able to get through a crack in the wall, and the DEA, of course, they didn't want to come after us. They just already lost a major battle a few years earlier. So the CBD revolution just exploded. And here we are today, and I don't take claim for it, but I definitely was there writing that opinion, and other people were doing CBD, but they weren't sure if it was legal or not. We really defined it.
Eric Hurlock: Right. Let's get back to Jack Herer. So you met him there at a store in, what'd you say, Van Nuys, California.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, Captain Ed Heads and High. It was a psychedelic shop because back then if you wanted a concert shirt, you wanted tie dyes, they didn't sell it anywhere else.
Eric Hurlock: Like a head shop.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, yeah. And he owned it. And he changed my life that day. He was my mentor, so once I got the hemp wallets and bags, I would give it to him. He was the leader of the whole movement and, of course, the famous author. I became one of his best friends, and I was the best man at his wedding with Jeannie. He really taught me well; I can just say that. So we really supported the movement back then. And it was, like I said, environmental. We would go to the federal building in Los Angeles and have a thousand people surround a federal building and have concerts and rallies to legalize hemp. No one knew what it was, so you spent 90% of your time just educating people what hemp was. And people got upset because they were like, 'Wait a sec, why didn't they tell me George Washington grew hemp? Why didn't they tell me Thomas Jefferson? Why didn't they tell me every ship and boat that crossed the ocean was powered by hemp?' So that got frustrating to a lot of people, like, well, why would they take that out of the history books?
Eric Hurlock: Why would they lie to us? Yeah, right.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was an eye opener, so it opened a lot of doors. Yes.
Eric Hurlock: Well, that book came into my life, I think, in '94.I was like a college dropout in Boulder, Colorado, for the summer, and that book sort of landed on our front porch on Arapahoe Avenue. Yeah, it blew my mind. It didn't really change anything for me at the time, but that information was in there. And then years later, I'm covering a field day at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, and it was the summer of 2017, and they were one of the first permitted hemp growers in Pennsylvania, and there I was standing next to four acres of hemp, and it all just came rushing back, and, like, 'Oh, this is it. We're doing it.' So yeah, that book, I know, affected a lot of people, but you had more than just the book, so that's amazing.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, I was fortunate to meet some of the early activists, and especially Jack, and he was just one of the smartest guys I've ever met. I mean, he knew everything. Like I said, I tell people, there's no way we would have the hemp movement the way it is today or even existed if he didn't write the book. I compare it to having Christianity without the Bible. He really laid the roots down. What he did was he traveled to colleges, like 200 or 300 colleges a year, and that's how he got money. He would speak at the colleges and sell his books. And, you know, after ten years of doing that, the word spreads. And plus, it's a guaranteed A on any research project. You know, you're teaching the teacher.
Eric Hurlock: Right, right. That's cool. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. So last week I was talking to an economist who had written a piece about how big cannabis is really having a detrimental effect on the fiber and grain sectors of hemp, sort of costing that side of the industry like $20 billion a year. I think you have some opinions about this because that's sort of happening in California. I wonder if we can talk about what's happening in California from a big cannabis point of view, regulator point of view, your point of view. What's going on out there?
Chris Boucher: Yes. So I'm also the director of the California Hemp Farmers Guild, and we're an advocacy group for hemp farmers. It's all about the farmer. They're the foundation of everything. Since I started drafting the original hemp laws, we always wanted it as an agricultural commodity, not regulated. We didn't want to regulate it like marijuana. It's not marijuana. It's hemp. So what's happening in California is that we've got these associations, and I'll name them: HIA, the Hemp Roundtable. They need money, and the CBD industry has flatlined, and the big money's gone, so they need money to prop up their association, so big cannabis has come in, and they've partnered with Hemp Roundtable, HIA. Again, I know these people, and it's all public information, and so they've crafted these new laws to regulate hemp. So you're wondering why Aurora and Canopy and the cannabis beverage industry is working with hemp associations. And so these new laws are very similar to marijuana, and again, I mentioned wordsmithing and linguistics. One of the big things they did in California, they changed the name of industrial hemp to cannabis sativa because there's a marijuana group, the California Department of Cannabis, they're in control and in charge of cannabis sativa. So if the definition of industrial hemp is cannabis sativa, they're able to regulate it.
Eric Hurlock: It falls under their jurisdiction. Yeah.
Chris Boucher: Yeah. There is shady characters in every business. Hey, if you're getting your vitamins and your dietary supplements, who's making it, right? But they don't pay fees and also opening up their financial box, their employees. So in California now, depending on how many employees you have, they have a tier system could cost from $2,000 to $40,000 to make hemp tinctures, hemp seeds, hemp seed oil, hemp granola bars.
Eric Hurlock: These are like permits? You have to pay for this permit?
Chris Boucher: It's a permit, and it's a regulatory system. What I mean by that, is it's designed very similar to marijuana. So you register, and the state inspectors come to your facility. So if you're in Texas, you're in Florida, you're in Pennsylvania and you're making a hemp-based product, you're going to have to apply to sell in California, and they'll have to inspect your facility to make sure it's a food grade facility. Plus, you have to disclose your financials when requested, and you also need to disclose your employees. This is what they do with marijuana because marijuana has a lot of shady people in the business, and they want to make sure there's no black market behind the scene, and so they really have to control it. And that's what this has done in California. Some people like, 'Well, now we can legally sell it.' And our statement is, they've been fed false information. Hemp is legal. It is a federal law passed by Congress. The FDA does not make laws just like the DEA doesn't. It'd be like having a gun or bullets and California says, 'Well, they're illegal here. Okay, you can't sell them here until we inspect your home, or we look at who bought it and who made it.' The industry should regulate itself, though. The local state government should be regulating an agricultural commodity that's regulated by the USDA. So it's all these layers that they put in that it hurts the farmer.
Eric Hurlock: Sure it does. It sounds like it. So this cannabis agency is a government, like a state government agency, that has now taken over jurisdiction of hemp like it had been in when, I imagine, the California Department of Agriculture had been overseeing it. But it's been moved out of that into this cannabis agency?
Chris Boucher: Yeah, it's been moved into the California Department of Health, and they work in conjunction with the Department of Cannabis Control, the DCC, and they're still publishing more regulations. Part of this law that they passed, which I can't believe these groups even endorsed, is called emergency regulation. You can ask your listeners, 'What is emergency regulation mean?' It means they can regulate hemp in California any time, any place, at any cost without any public input. I mean, this is scary, and we're waving the flag going, 'You guys see this?' And some people aren't aware of it until it hits home.
Eric Hurlock: Can you give me an example of how this has affected your average hemp farmer in California?
Chris Boucher: First of all, we've lost 90% of hemp farmers in California. We went from 800 farmers; I think we're down to 120, and how many of them are actually growing? Farmers don't like filling out tons of paperwork and exposing their employees and opening their financials, and if they want to do vertical integration, if they want to press oil on the farm, they're going to have to pay for it, and they might not because it's going to cost them a lot of money because they want everything that's made made in a GMP facility. They don't do that with tomatoes or carrots or broccoli, and from a farmer's point of view, that's how we look at it, as an agricultural commodity, and that's what it is by the Federal Law Farm Bill 2018. They grabbed a hold of it, and we're trying to figure out how they can go into a store, a health food store or a pet store or a gas station, and say, 'Okay, this CBD company, who are they? What state are they in? Have they applied to California? Did they pay all the fees? Have we inspected them? I mean, it's a nightmare when you start looking at it. But again, not many people see what we see because we're on the front lines fighting this, and we lost. We lost AB45. We tried to prevent it from taking place. We warned everybody, and now it's here. All of the regulations haven't come out yet. They're still publishing. You can go to the CDPH website, and you can see all the FAQs and what you need to do. You can see the fee schedule, how many employees. I mean, it's a bureaucratic nightmare that hemp should never, ever have to go through.
Eric Hurlock: And the regulators were lobbied heavily by certain groups?
Chris Boucher: Yes, you can see the lobbyist from Hemp Roundtable, HIA, California Hemp Council. Then you have Aurora. You've got Canopy. These are billion dollar companies when you look on their valuation on Nasdaq or wherever they trade. So you have the big, big companies that endorsed this because they want control of cannabinoids. They want all cannabinoids being regulated under marijuana companies because they do get a little upset when they pay a million dollars for the dispensary. Then you walk out the front door of the marijuana club and across the street they're selling CBD at the gas station or the health food store, and they didn't pay anything. But CBD is not a, how do I say, compared to hemp. So it's the main molecule on hemp. So it's not marijuana derived. They basically bred all the CBD out of marijuana because back in the seventies and eighties and nineties, you didn't want CBD in marijuana because it doesn't get you as high. So they bred it out. But we believe hemp-derived cannabinoids are the key foundation to the commodity of hemp. Fast forward, we look over in Europe, and we look at the largest hemp fiber companies in Europe. They cannot survive on hemp fiber alone. So they have dual crops. They're growing CBD flowers on top, and they come through, and they cut the tops, and then, they cut the stocks, and the farmers get to sell maybe a couple hundred dollars more per acre when they sell the CBD tops. And that really makes the huge difference because I can tell you right now, fiber alone, I don't know how it's going to make it because it's a global commodity. It's not like CBD. And there's a price point set on fibers, whether it's hemp fiber, jute fiber, sisal fiber. And so you have to compete there. And if a farmer is only making $300 to $400 an acre, and he can add an extra $600 or $700, whether it's CBD, CBG, so the dual crops are going to be the future, which is happening in Europe, and they're way ahead of us, and they've learned. So we believe, and I definitely see it. I've been doing it for so long, and when I look at the price of fiber and hurd, it's going to be a tough one to sell to farmers. They might want to grow, I don't know, alfalfa. They might want to grow corn.
Eric Hurlock: Or wheat or something. Something you don't need a permit for. Something that you don't have people showing up at your farm from the government taking samples. Yeah. Something a lot easier.
Chris Boucher: Exactly. And we already have to do a FBI background check, and that's good enough. You pay the local ag commissioner your permit, and that's good enough. You don't have to get the state involved, and they're doing this in many states. But back to the dual crops and the environmental factor. The Europeans are like, 'Well, why do you Americans want to use all this water, all this labor, all this fertilizer and get like one commodity out of it, fiber and hurd, where you could get a good genetic dual crop and take your CBD from the tops or maybe even CBG.' There's a lot of other molecules that are hemp derived that are very useful. Even some companies in Europe are doing tri cork crops, and when you look at it, that's the American way. George and Tom, they all grew tri crops. They didn't throw anything away. Do you think they just grew a fiber and they threw the tops away? They grew THC tops and fiber. But we don't want to go there. And actually, Jack used to always say that, 'This is what's going to happen. They're going to grow it all under one plant.' Because, again, why would you just only grow one commodity? It doesn't make economic sense.
Eric Hurlock: Right, especially when the plant has so much to offer in all those places.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, exactly. So we're going to see the dual crop, the genetics, I think really change here in the next few years. And I believe that's going to help the farmer more than anything.
Eric Hurlock: So getting back to California. So these lobbying groups came in and, what, kind of miseducated or misled some regulators into thinking that hemp needed to be regulated more as a drug than a than an agricultural commodity? And so it freaked everybody out?
Chris Boucher: It was all built on a lie. So the state of California, the Department of Health, said, 'Hemp is not safe for humans. We don't believe it's legal.' The word believe and an FAQ, it's not a lot. So what the hemp industry told everybody, 'Hey, hemp's not legal in California, but if we pass this California law, AB 45, it will be legal to sell.' A lot of people didn't realize an opinion is not a law. Just because the state of California says guns are illegal, they're not. And I don't like using those two analogies, but it's just plain and simple so that everyone understands that you just can't make a federally legal agricultural commodity illegal because you don't like it. That's kind of the bottom line.
Eric Hurlock: It comes down to competition, too, right? I mean, that's why they're trying to get control of it, so they don't have to compete.
Chris Boucher: They believe that hemp people should only farm fiber and seed and every other cannabinoid known in the plant should be done by marijuana people. And they've spent a lot of money, and they've got big money, and they've pushed this misinformation, and they've teamed up with some pretty good associations that have done some good work. Don't get me wrong, but the money's running out. This is the way I see it. The money is running out, so when somebody like Aurora or Canopy or, I mean there's a few other companies I'm missing, I mean we don't know what they've given them. They will have to disclose it, and to us this regulation just really hurts the farmer, and that's our main concern, the farmer protecting the farmer because this is where it's going to take off. If the farmers grow it, it becomes bigger and bigger. But if marijuana takes it over, it snuffs the industry out. It's still going to be just, I would say, a smaller commodity. It's not going to make it to where it should go in terms of billions of dollars.
Eric Hurlock: And that would be a shame because there are so many environmental benefits to growing huge quantities of hemp around the world.
Chris Boucher: Yeah the animal feed, all the animals that could have CBD. They've done all the studies in Euro pe with cows. I mean cows that have CBD, they produce 20% more milk and less stress. Horses, the whole poultry industry. It's almost like the cannabinoids, hemp-derived cannabinoids, are like radioactive. Like we're not sure if we want to touch it yet. And again, we have to overcome this fear and understand, 'Hey, it's just a commodity, and it's good for the farmer.'
Eric Hurlock: It wouldn't be the first time that hemp has been sort of the victim of a smear campaign in order to take care of competition. Right? Because isn't that the story of prohibition in the 30s?
Chris Boucher: Yes, and it's our own people doing the smear campaign, but it's all about money.
Eric Hurlock: Well, let's talk about the associations. Like I look around at the landscape, and there's so many different associations. Right? I've had some guests say there's too many, like right now there's no unified voice, and everybody seems to be working against each other. Do you have any thoughts on like consolidation? Do you think that's a good idea? Do you think that could even happen?
Chris Boucher: You know, it's a tough one because the associations have now turned into revenue streaming businesses, in a sense. So when we started the California Hemp Farmers Guild, it's an agricultural farmers guild; it's like a co-op. These aren't co-ops. These are associations that can generate revenue through membership and things, and they're living on this. This is where they get their money. And now they're doing like hemp authority. You get a Hemp Authority stamp approved by them. And it's a secondary revenue stream, which is okay. I'm not against that. But, yes. These groups, they're not even farmers. Most of these groups are distributors, manufacturers, salespeople, and with our group, you have to be a registered farmer to actually vote, but we accept anyone into our group. It definitely has convoluted these associations of get money. They need money to survive, and they will do all kinds of cool things or uncool things.
Eric Hurlock: So if I were a regulator and I needed to do some research about industrial hemp for the farm bill or something, and I was looking around and wanted to reach out to an association, it's like roulette wheel, right? Who are you going to get and what are they going to tell you? What's their agenda? That seems dangerous on that respect? But then also from a consumer point of view, if there's all these different sort of like seals of approval, who do you trust? It seems like a bad situation is a brewin'.
Chris Boucher: Exactly. You just really hit the hammer on the head of the nail. There's so many of these groups, and where do the farmers go because they want to be protected? And it's really these associations. They've lobbied; they've done some good stuff. But if you're looking for an association, you want somebody that supports non-regulation. When you start getting into a group hemp association that is all about regulation because they want to control the industry, they want to make sure it's clean and safe, well, that's what a free market economy is about. That's how businesses expand and the industry grows. It's free market economics, and that's what agriculture is all about, you know. So we don't see them, like I said in the beginning, regulating tomato sauce or cottonseed oil or sugar cane.
Eric Hurlock: I mean, there are like safety regulations, right?
Chris Boucher: OSHA. Yes. You follow your safety regulations, and if you're making a food, you make sure it's made in a food grade facility, but you don't pay fees to the state to make sure that you're making your vitamins. You qualify under FDA standards, and you have your protocols, and you have your insurances, liability. But the state doesn't regulate those businesses, and they should never regulate hemp. And this is the Jack Herer in me speaking because we simply can't let them regulate this, and it's happening.
Eric Hurlock: What blows my mind is that hemp is generally regarded as safe for human consumption. You can feed hemp seeds to your baby, your kids, but it's illegal to feed it to your livestock. Like that just blows my mind. And we would be so much further ahead as an industry if the animal feed industry was opened up. It's just so frustrating to me.
Chris Boucher: Yes. And I think the lessons I've learned early on is there's only so much you can do to legislate and pass laws, and then there's a thing called litigation. Like when we sued the DEA, they lost. I think it was like less than a 1% chance that we would win. And I know Bronner, Dave Bronner from Bronner Soap, he put up a lot of money for that. I think one time he said, 'Yeah, I like those odds.' To me, I think there needs to be some massive litigation against the FDA, and that's how things get done quicker and faster. It creates a case precedent, and I'll use an example: statin in red rice yeast. Are you familiar with that whole litigation that took place? Statin's like a billion dollar cholesterol drug, and it's made from a natural rice yeast called red rice yeast. It grows everywhere in rice fields. And they said, 'Well, we have a pharmaceutical, and we don't want anyone selling red rice yeast. It can't be sold as a dietary supplement.' And it was a four-year battle, and the companies that did the red rice yeast won. That's why you see it in Whole Foods and the health food stores. Instead of taking statin, you can buy red rice yeast because it's made out of the same thing.
Chris Boucher: So that's my take on it. Maybe I'm wrong, but from what I see, and with big marijuana, we need to step up and go after the FDA. I believe Johnson and Johnson, did you hear about what they said to the FDA like two weeks ago? So Johnson and Johnson basically petitioned publicly the FDA two weeks ago and said you need to roll out at least a phase one of CBD regulation or whatever you're doing. We need something. So I was like, 'Well, why is Johnson and Johnson making this statement?' You can Google it. I'm sure you'll find it.
Eric Hurlock: Well, I mean, just to extrapolate off of that, they've got something lined up that they could be selling, right?
Chris Boucher: Yeah. I just did a big trade show in Chicago. One of the biggest ingredient shows in the United States or North America. You're seeing hemp pop up, but everyone was just scared because the FDA and most of these big giant public corporations, their attorneys are like, 'Well, if there's a 1% chance that the FDA could write us a letter or come after us, we don't want to take that chance.' But we saw some really big companies that were actually starting to roll out hemp proteins and some CBDs. Even Ocean Spray. I don't know if you know Ocean Spray Cranberries, they had a CBD drink. Just speaking with everybody, there's still that gray area. The billions and billions of dollars that's supposed to be on the table is in the closet right now because everyone's like, 'Should we do it? Should we wait? What's the FDA going to do?' So yeah, that's the elephant in the room.
Eric Hurlock: Yeah, well, that sort of brings me to my next question here. It's like, how do we get the message of hemp into the other industries. I was talking to Bill Althouse. I'm sure you know Bill.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, Bill's been around. Great, really, really intelligent guy.
Eric Hurlock: Yeah. And so he was on the show a few weeks ago, and his main message was legitimization. Like, you have to meet all of the the specs and standards of all of the other industries that hemp can disrupt. We have to sort of get in there and speak the language of these other industries because what he says is the construction people think hempcrete people are crazy. Like they think basically hemp people are crazy because they're not coming up with these, like they're not sort of backing up their claims. So I thought it was very interesting, and what do you think about that?
Chris Boucher: Yeah. And again, just like I was at the big IFT show in Chicago, one of the biggest shows in the world, and speaking with these billion dollar corporations, it's the FDA, FDA, FDA, FDA, FDA. If they just either rolled out a phase one program; they're putting a kibosh on it. So all these companies want to have thousands of different hemp products, but the FDA is scaring them. And that's what they all said, 'Well, we're waiting for.' You or I doesn't really care about the FDA because I know the law. I'm not afraid of them. And every single letter the FDA has ever written to a hemp CBD company, they never once said it's illegal. They just said you can't make medical claims. They did do one for pet food. I just heard that two or three weeks ago there was a letter saying, 'Well, you can't put CBD in pet food; it's illegal.' And that was an eye opener. That was the first time I've ever read that. But all of the last eight years, every FDA letter has never once said CBD is illegal. Looking at the tea leaves, what's going on? And again, back to the industry, yeah, we do need to shore up the science and what it is, whether it's the fiber, the hempcrete, the protein, the CBD, all the CBCs, CBGs. Where is it made? And that's what industry does. It self-regulate itself in a free market economy. But when, like I said earlier, the FDA is like hanging over your shoulder. You're a publicly traded corporation. You don't take risks.
Eric Hurlock: Right. Right. Too much money at stake.
Chris Boucher: Again, I go back to, we need to sue the FDA and litigate them and take them to court because what they're doing is they're destroying a multibillion dollar industry. And guess what? It effects the farmer. Imagine when Johnson and Johnson and Kroger and all these huge now, I mean, I'm just naming companies that want to use a hemp product whether it's plant-based, whether it's cannabinoid-based, whether it's fiber-based. We're going to be growing millions of acres of hemp, but we can't get there until the FDA takes this noose off of our neck. And again, that's from my point of view and my 30 years of experience. I just keep saying that, and I don't have the power to stop the FDA. But I do know if there was a collective of farmers and manufacturers that did go after them because they've stalled, and what they're doing is destroying an industry, plain and simple.
Eric Hurlock: Right. Sort of in the cradle. Right?
Eric Hurlock: I was going to say, can that be handled legislatively? Like if Congress actually did something--I know that's farfetched. I mean, the FDA doesn't create the laws, so they would have to interpret the laws that Congress would create.
Chris Boucher: We have an agricultural commodity. So in Congress, it says all parts of the plant are legal. And what they've done is they said, we're not sure if it's safe. This is, what, eight, nine years? Okay. I mean, they passed the vaccine in six months. It's safe. I believe, again, it's time for a massive litigation, just like the red rice yeast and statin. Okay. Billion dollar pharmaceutical versus hemp farmers growing red rice yeast. So this is big. And again, after all these years, legislation, it's not working. Now, that's the old way.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, it's broken; there you go. And we don't have time to fix it because I've been doing this for 30 years. I'm 60 years old. I don't want to wait another ten years, you know? And same with all the young entrepreneurs out there and the young farmers, you know, and hemp has brought young people into farming like we've never seen before.
Eric Hurlock: It's a gateway crop.
Chris Boucher: Yes, a gateway crop. I love that. So imagine if it was legal in that sense that the FDA didn't have the noose on it, and we could grow. Everybody would be growing hemp crop whether it was fiber and food, and again, the dual crops is the way to go.
Eric Hurlock: Time is of the essence here, right? I mean, because the climate crisis is just getting worse all the time, and we haven't really started mitigation. But we could be doing a lot more towards mitigation. There's, I forget the guy's name, but some quote from a few years ago, he's like, 'Look, climate change, you're going to have to mitigate. There's going to be some adaption, and there's going to be suffering.' It's the ratio of those three, it depends on how much mitigation we can do now. And if we're just letting the clock run out, we're absolutely doomed.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, I guess. Yes.
Eric Hurlock: And I'm an optimist.
Chris Boucher: I'm an optimist, and then again, my optimism is sue the FDA, and we'll it will get there a lot quicker.
Eric Hurlock: Is that happening? Are people coming together to put that together?
Chris Boucher: I don't think so. There's a lot more money for these associations to go to D.C. Let's lobby. We'll pay our lobbyist. We'll have lobbyists in Texas and California, Pennsylvania. And it's just this whole slow boat to China, I hate to say. But again, you know, as Jack used to say, the Chinese are the ones who started the American Hemp Revolution. We have got to thank them, and they don't regulate it there. It's a communist country, and they don't regulate hemp there. They don't regulate in Poland. They don't regulate in Hungary, Romania, Austria, the Czech Republic.
Eric Hurlock: Because they don't have a way for madness because that's what it's all about, right? It's about a fear of the THC.
Chris Boucher: Yeah. And they're just going to be like hash labs. And I mean, when we used to lobby in California in '95, '98, '99, 2000, we would always have the Police Chiefs Association, the Sheriffs Association. They would have a lobbyist who would come and tell the senators and the assembly people, 'Hey, these hemp people look at them,' because we all had tie-dyes and long hair. 'Hemp is a front. They really don't want to legalize hemp. They're going to use the hemp,and they're going to grow marijuana fields in the middle.' And and for years, the guy would say the same thing over and over again. I think we had three governors veto, three major bills that went to the state of California. Schwarzenegger vetoed two of them. We used to call him the Hempenegger.
Eric Hurlock: This is way off topic, but no one's died from THC overdose, right? It's not actually a dangerous drug. That's been the narrative. So yeah, but that's off topic.
Chris Boucher: I've noticed over the years that there's some people that should never drink alcohol. There's some people that should never smoke pot. We all have issues, and you've got to know and learn, 'Hey, this is not for me. And if I smoke it or do it, it could lead to serious consequences because I'm not mentally stable or whatever.' But it's the people that it's helped has been just unbelieveable.
Eric Hurlock: Like the other side of that from CBD. I think we can credit THC hemp for the Beatles. Right? Can I draw that line?
Chris Boucher: Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that's a great analogy. You know, moving forward, we keep on seeing these new hemp-derived cannabinoids. Like I think we mentioned earlier, my company, Farmtiva, we created a new company called JuiceTiva, and we've been able to extract, not even extract but press, the plant into a CBDA juice. And the CBDA is like 100 times more powerful than CBD, but you don't see it in the market because the only way you get CBDA is unless you eat the leaves or you juice it right away. So there's all these new foods that're going to pop up, hopefully, once the FDA gets out of our business.
Eric Hurlock: Right. So you're sort of like stuck in limbo with the JuiceTiva. That product's not on the market yet?
Chris Boucher: It is on the market. We rolled it out at the International Ingredient Show, definitely there's some big companies using it. It's kind of like athletic greens or super greens. You just put the powder in your drink and mix it in the morning, and bang, you get 25, 30 milligrams of CBDA, which is equivalent to about maybe 400 milligrams of CBD. But the only way you can get this molecule is, like I said, either eating it or juicing it, or we do a JuiceTiva. It's a liposonix-type freeze-drying process, and it basically was invented by the military in order to to preserve nutrients, vitamins and minerals to get to the frontline soldiers when they're in battle fighting for 24 hours a day. They can't live on bread and butter. They need nutrients and vitamins. The food supply was real important, and so freeze-drying, they invented that for the military to basically lock in all the nutrients to preserve them. It's bioavailable and water soluble and so forth and so on, so there's so many more products to come from the plant that we haven't even seen, and this is a superfood. It's something that we've been working on for years, but when we compare it to like wheat grass or dark, leafy greens, this is just as equal, if not better, with all the vitamins and the minerals and all the vital cannabinoids, and it's water soluble and bioavailable. Most CBD is only 10% or 15% bioavailable. That's another whole subject, but the new subject, 'Hey, this is a food. We can grow this like lettuce.' Eventually you go into the supermarket and right next to the arugula will be hemp leaves. And so we just need to get over that stigma. And again, back to the farmer. Once we get there the farmers are going to be growing this everywhere.
Eric Hurlock: Yep, that's what I hope. But without the farmer, there is nothing.
Eric Hurlock: All right. So the the JuiceTiva is that more like a B2B thing, like you're selling that as an ingredient to other food manufacturers or is that available, like, could I go out and buy that?
Chris Boucher: Yeah we do sell it on our website JuiceTiva.com or FarmTiva.com, but our main business is B2B. We sell it in large volume, and people can either repackage it, relabel it, or they can put it in their smoothies. Individual package 30-day supply, 60-day. They could mix it in the food. And it's not an extract. It's a food. It's similar basically in the same legal category as hemp seeds or hemp seed oil or hemp protein powder. So it's just basically 100% pure plant. We take about 100 pounds of leaves, and we use a special variety of genetics, and 100 pounds will maybe give us three or four pounds of powder, so it's super concentrated. It's definitely going to be, as you know, like the whole athletic greens and super greens is one of the fastest growing trends in the health food industry. We happened just to roll it out during this expansion of that industry, so it's doing quite well.
Eric Hurlock: Cool. All right. People can learn about that at FarmTiva.com.
Eric Hurlock: All right. So how about other like bright spots in the industry in the U.S.? Like, I'm sure you're keeping an eye on lots of different folks out there who out there is doing stuff that you're impressed with?
Chris Boucher: What I'm impressed with in the fiber industry is the textile. So when I look at something, I'm like, where's the money? Where's the money? Where's the revenue? So a a textile fiber has the most value in terms of the industrial hemp fibers. You can do nonwovens and woven. I was in the clothing industry, the hemp holding industry for 25 years, and so I see there's Bare Fiber. I know he's back east in North Carolina near you guys. I mean, gosh, you guys owned the Conestoga wagon covers were made right in Lancaster, right?
Eric Hurlock: Yeah, right in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Yep.
Chris Boucher: Yeah. Old Conestoga. They grew some of the best hemp fiber there. And old Ironside, I think, the old battleship, fiber was grown there.
Eric Hurlock: That's the one that's in Boston Harbor now, right?
Chris Boucher: That's correct. And so the fiber, if we can extrapolate the fiber and actually start spinning it, but the problem was, is we destroyed our textile industry in America. And everything we wear, whether it's shoes, underwear or clothes, is either made in China, Vietnam or Thailand because that was the economics. People said, 'Well, we don't want to make this stuff here. We don't want to pay people to make it. We'll just pay cheap foreign labor to make it.'
Eric Hurlock: Don't want to pay a living wage. Yeah.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, and so maybe with the cost of everything going up, the industry might revive itself, but all your infrastructure and your spinning equipment to make long bast fibers like the linens that are quality just don't exist here. So some of the fiber guys that are going into the textiles are doing like a 70-30 blend. But legally, with the FTC, which is the Federal Trade Commission, when you label a textile product, it has to have more than 51% hemp in it to call it hemp fabric. So if it has, you know, 70% cotton, 30% hemp, you cannot legal call it hemp. So when you see the Chinese, I mean, they were the masters of spinning, and also the Polish. I used to supply Converse with all of their hemp fabric out of Poland, and they made a canvas that they used to make for the Russian military. And it was just bulletproof, and I don't see that here yet. My idea back in the nineties was I was going to buy a Chinese factory or a Polish hemp factory and just unbolt the equipment and ship it in. Like, why try to reinvent something? That to me is a real bright spot, and then, of course, the hempcrete is happening but it's logistics. Where can you ship hempcrete? You can't really truck in across the country because you know the volume of it and the weight.
Eric Hurlock: It's so fluffy. It just becomes cost prohibitive at that point.
Chris Boucher: Yeah. But I really see again like the bright spots are the dual crops where you're getting a textile fiber or non-woven fiber, and you're getting CBD buds on top. Sometimes it depends what kind of fiber you use. I do consulting, and there's so many consultants out there. And so one of the big things and when you grow hemp for fiber, you have to be careful of the lignin. The older the plant gets, the more lignin goes into the fiber. And when do you cut the plant down? The Chinese taught me quite a bit when I was there in the nineties, and it's just understanding the science behind the harvesting--when to harves--and at the end of the day what are you going to produce with that fiber? Is it going to be a non-woven? Is it going to be a textile? Is it going to be a wet pulp-based paper or maybe even feed? And the hurd is a byproduct. It could be used for pulping, but the price of wood pulp is 50 bucks a ton, so you can't compete. Why is somebody going to pay a dollar for one sheet of paper when they can get a wood piece for a penny.
Eric Hurlock: But then if we can throw in like the environmental cost of tree pulp. Because people don't really think about that. I mean, maybe they're starting to a bit more, but these trees have to grow however many years before you can pulp them up. And then we need those, what are they? The boreal forests around the sort of top of the planet. Like, we need that stuff. We shouldn't be chopping them down for toilet paper.
Chris Boucher: Oh, I agree. I want to put a shout out to my my friends in California, the Riverdale Hemp Factory. They're one of the larger growers in California of the gin and the honey, which grow like 20, 25 feet tall. If you've never been in a hemp forest, I suggest you go into one. We were there last year, and they had plants that were 20 to 25 feet tall, and it's 105 degrees out. You walk into the hemp canopy, and it's like 30 degrees cooler. It's in the high eighties. What they're doing out there is just incredible with the fiber and building like tiny homes, building houses right there. One of the big things people should look at as a farmer is vertical integration. If you can process on your farm, your chances of being successful are like ten times more because if you're just going to sell your fiber, there's not a lot of money. Do the math. So vertical integration for the farmers, and we see that as the future, or cooperatives--you team up with other farmers and buy the equipment, and that's the way it's going to work. But again, if they have to jump through all this regulation and pay fees--
Eric Hurlock: No one's going to.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, that's why they're farming. They don't want to be involved in, let's call this regulatory red tape.
Eric Hurlock: The vision I have for hemp, it's like we've seen these global supply chains and how just weak they are with war, climate, health issues, COVID, etc., and we need to establish local supply chains, regional supply chains. And I have the vision of lots of hemp being grown right next to the manufacturing plants, the processing plants. And, I don't know. I'm an idealist. I'm a dreamer. But we have to dream big, right, in order to get to the world that we want to be living in. And I think hemp is the perfect thing for that. I'm not convinced that everything needs to be hemp, but I think everything needs to be agricultural based, right? The farmers need to be sort of the engine of industry rather than the petroleum and the oil companies.
Chris Boucher: Yes. Jack used to say, we need to go back to a carbohydrat-based economy and switch from a petroleum-based economy. Anything you can make from a petroleum molecule, you can make from a carbohydrate. And we're seeing that happen. I mean, again, when I was at the trade show, all these huge companies, they're doing plant-based foods. And we're realizing we can't eat meat three or four times a day. Yeah, people need to eat meat, but the sustainability, just to even sustain the water we're using to feed animals because our appetite in America is everyone wants a T-Bone steak three times a day, and I got nothing against that, I'm just saying that we need to balance that out.
Eric Hurlock: But yeah, like you're threatening people's livelihood as soon as you start saying, 'Well, we should eat less meat, right.' So it's like we need an entire paradigm shift. Like the mindsets of people need to shift into the next phase of human existence, which I really hope is a regenerative mindset.
Chris Boucher: Oh, yeah. I was at I was at the Cornelll booth, and they had plant-based pulled pork, and their market, they were going after Muslims and Jewish people because they don't eat pork. But now they can eat a pulled pork sandwich made out of plants.
Eric Hurlock: Kosher plant-based pork. Okay.
Chris Boucher: That's a billion dollar industry. It's sustainable in that sense.
Eric Hurlock: I keep waiting for, like, consumers to rise up and be like, 'We demand our food to be more sustainable or our clothing needs to be regenerative.' Where are the customers? Where are the consumers? I assume they're all just distracted with their phones and their financial problems.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, I'm seeing the younger generation, the Zs, this whole new generation of kids that lived through 9-11; they've lived through all of the transitions we've had in the last 20 years. And they're very inclusive, and they're very open, and they don't like what we've done. And so the change is coming, but it's just as our society as I see it, we want things cheap. We want it now. And we don't understand the economics, and we're starting to now, the whole food supply and the food chain and just the whole entire economics of this global supply chain has just really torn things apart.
Eric Hurlock: Yeah, it's not sustainable.
Chris Boucher: Yeah, it's not sustainable. Exactly. And we're seeing that.
Eric Hurlock: Well, I tried to end it on a bright spot, but then we got sucked back in. But Chris Boucher, it is great talking to you today. Thank you so much for your time.
Chris Boucher: Eric, I really appreciate it, and anytime, I'm here, and I would love to circle back at any questions anyone has. I would love to answer, and I really appreciate you having me on. It's an honor.
Eric Hurlock: Yeah, well, likewise. Thank you.
Eric Hurlock is digital editor at Lancaster Farming and host of the Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast. He can be reached at (717) 721-4462 or ehurlock@lancasterfarming.com
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