So I left off we had just harvested our first 28 plants. Now we had to dry and cure the plants. We lived in a tiny 2 bedroom duplex that wasn't going to work. We ended up stripping a small camper and using it as a drying and curing trailer. The plants we had filled the entire little trailer.
At this point we were trying to sell the hemp flower to other companies that were making CBD products. Surprisingly companies don't want to talk to you unless you already have big money. I just don't really understand it. But we weren't going to let this stop us we had to find a way to make this a product we could get to the people. We had to learn how to make CBD concentrate. That lead us to videos of people such as Rick Simpson making his now famous oil. We wanted to keep our products natural and organic. So we settled on alcohol extraction methods.
We use food grade alcohol to do all of our extractions so no chemicals are every used to make our products. Decarboxylating CBD oil is a very technical and slow process. You have to heat the oil just enough to make the alcohol evaporate. But if you heat the oil too hot CBD starts to degrade. We quickly learned that you need a very precise stove. A normal stove top fluctuates to much. $600 later we had this amazing stove that can be set to almost any exact temperature and it doesn't fluctuate at all. After several mishaps we had tuned our process in. But it was fun just like high school chemistry. We have evolved our process now and use stills and very technical lab equipment that allow us to reclaim most of the alcohol.
Testing quickly became an issue. The state wouldn't allow hemp companies to test our oil at any facilities that tested medical marijuana. We eventually found labs out of state that could test our oil. We couldn't believe the numbers we started getting in our tests. CBD levels were off the charts.
We were approaching companies with our CBD oil now trying to offer wholesale pricing to move the oil. Can you believe it that companies still weren't interested in our product even with testing in had. So we had to start making our own products and get them to market. We started selling our products online through sites like Etsy. That quickly became very successful. We were selling our concentrated oil very quickly. Then Etsy shut us down. They refused to understand that we are making and selling a hemp product. One by one we would join an online site just to be shut down once sales happened. Since then Etsy as well of others have banned the sales of anything CBD related on their sites.
Next we had to learn how to make our own website because no other company would let us sell our products. Now we had to buy domain names, register a website, create a brand and logo. This was all new territory for us but we managed to figure it out. One night in late 2015 IndustrialHempSupply-CBD.com is born. Well, just getting a website online doesn't mean instant sales. No one knows you exist. We started trying to promote our page. We quickly found that all types of online advertising has a ban on anything related to cannabis in any way. We had to self promote our page through social media. It was the only way.
During this time we had been raising new mothers and preparing for the next year. We had to barrow a friends barn and grow our mothers there for a few months. We were eventually able to move our mothers to a proper facility and we started cloning. We needed thousands of clones. We quickly found that this strain of hemp was very tricky to clone. It demands a very precise humidity and temperature to get the cuttings to root. After more tests than i can count we dialed in the cloning requirements for this strain.
By this time it was April and we had hundreds of clones. Spring was coming and we were getting ready for planting season. While working a full time job managing a pawnshop I was trying to prepare the field in my free time. I trucked in several tons of manure to prep the field.
Around this time I stopped working at the pawn shop. This presented me with a choice go all the way with my company or find another job. I have no interest in working for someone else. It's so unfulfilling. I decided to put everything I have into my company. I started signing up for every event i could find. Farmers markets, expos, and festivals anything to get my products in front of people.
In Colorado the typical planting season is after mothers day. This year the spring was cold we had to wait an extra week or so. This time it was four of us and we had the field plowed in advance. It took us several days but we managed to get the field planted. We filled an acre.
