By Ed Geis
Most farmers understand you can grow the most beautiful crops in the world, but unless there’s a market for them, profits are just a pipe dream. When it comes to hemp - a growing $5.5 billion worldwide industry - you’re looking at an extremely versatile plant used for food, medicine, textiles, building materials, animal care, paper, and other products. To grow hemp successfully, you definitely need to think carefully about who’s going to buy your hemp and why (or who will buy your value-added hemp-derived products). As the fallout of broken dreams and financial mayhem from the 2019 hemp “gold rush” demonstrated, planting now and figuring out the details later is risky business.
A common axiom among experienced hemp growers is to have a buyer’s commitment before buying seed. Not bad advice, but it's not necessarily applicable to everyone. In my case, for example, the hemp I grow is harvested for flowers, which I use to make a few simple medicinal CBD products sold directly to customers. With this business model, the challenge is differentiating your product from the many alternatives out there and giving customers a reason to choose yours. This is especially true now since the CBD industry in the U.S. actually declined 10% between 2023 and 2022.
Marketing Hemp and CBD
I’m now in my third year of growing commercial hemp in Maine and while the husbandry aspect has gone well (knock on wood!), marketing has proven to be quite challenging. I thought I’d take the opportunity to share my experiences so far, hoping it might help others.
I decided to grow hemp for medicinal CBD in 2021 after learning about CBD’s remarkable power to help people with a wide array of medical conditions or just to feel better in general. I’d grown a hemp plant during the pandemic lockdown in 2020 and was impressed with the plant’s vigor, resiliency, and “personality,” for lack of a better word. Hemp had just been Federally legalized two years before and the CBD market was booming. It seemed like there were definitely possibilities to generate some income while providing valuable medicine and enjoying the satisfaction of growing a remarkable plant.
But there were also some red flags. After the 2018 Farm Bill passed Congress and farmers could legally grow hemp, many people jumped headlong into hemp with dreams of making major money. Unfortunately, quite a few of those folks crashed and burned and the price collapsed from a glutted market. Here in Maine, we went from over 100 growers to just a couple dozen or so.
I learned that to succeed with a hemp-based business, you needed to either have a buyer lined up before planting or have a vertically integrated business model with distinctive value-added products and a solid marketing plan.
A New Business
Since I’ve long been committed to organic agriculture and was just starting to learn about no-till regenerative farming, I decided to create a CBD business where I would grow the hemp, craft a few simple products, and sell directly to customers online with my own e-commerce site. Since hemp flower and CBD vendors are now a dime a dozen, I planned to differentiate myself from the competition by offering USDA organic certified products, thorough and transparent testing by a 3rd party lab to ensure purity and potency, and highlighting my business’s sustainability and low-impact practices. I aimed to appeal to customers who value not only their own health and safety (CBD products, being mostly unregulated, are notoriously dicey in terms of potential contaminants and overall quality) but also value an ethic of care toward the environment as well as developing a relationship with a trusted “small family farm.” The goal was to connect with people who buy local organic food, avoid patronizing exploitative corporate vendors like Amazon, and go out of their way to patronize businesses that share their values and outlook.
E-commerce Focus
At first, I focused on selling online rather than trying to place products in local stores, partly because, with my low volume, I decided that wholesale pricing would not be sustainable for the business. But having a presence in the local community is also important, so this year, I’ve decided to join the local farmer’s market, which allows me to still sell directly to consumers but will expose my products to more potential customers (time will tell—the market begins this week (early May) and runs through October).
Getting the website in front of the right eyeballs has been a real challenge, especially since most web platforms like Google don’t allow CBD advertising (although Google is experimenting with a limited program for advertising CBD but that’s not available yet in Maine). That leaves Search Engine Optimization (SEO), that mysterious and never-ending process of fine-tuning the website to entice Google to display it on the first page results for appropriate searches. SEO is part science and part art and can easily be a full-time job of creating quality content, trying various measures, evaluating their effectiveness, and making constant adjustments based on results.
With all the CBD vendors now online, some with big marketing budgets and SEO consultants, this turned out to be a lot harder than I anticipated. For some of the search phrases I originally targeted, such as “USDA-certified organic CBD,” my website is often buried several pages back in the search results (where nobody ever goes)! So, search traffic for those queries has not been consistently strong. Interestingly, I’ve had more success with organic hemp flower searches since there’s much less competition online than for CBD. One lesson here is that if you want to get good visibility on Google, you need to spend a fair bit of time working on SEO, monitoring search traffic analytics, and making adjustments and tweaks regularly depending on what’s working and what isn’t (or you need to hire somebody to do this for you).
Being an Educator
One approach I’ve used to good effect is thinking of myself less as a purveyor of CBD products and more as a hemp and CBD educator sharing knowledge. Because CBD is still relatively new and many people have heard of it but may not know much about its uses, there’s a real need for accurate research-based knowledge about CBD. So I’ve made an effort to learn as much as I can about how CBD is used, what the latest medical research is discovering, how to figure out dosage, etc. Wearing my educator hat, I do informative presentations on hemp and CBD to organizations like libraries or garden clubs. These events always generate interest and a few sales as well, even though the presentations focus on information rather than products.
Going Local
For the first time, I’ll be attending our local Camden Farmer's Market in Maine on Saturdays 9-noon, in May-October, which seems like a good way to connect with the local community and the summer tourists who flock to Maine every year. I expect I’ll be in “educator mode” quite often as curious patrons stop at the tent and hopefully, this will lead to some lively business and more word-of-mouth publicity around the local area.
Communicating Business Values
A critical area I need to do more in is conveying the underlying values of my business so that people view Bald Mountain Botanicals not just as a trusted organic CBD source but as an organization that embodies sustainability, care, and responsibility to the larger society and world. Regenerative farming practices like no-till have huge implications for climate (properly managed soil has the potential to sequester large amounts of carbon). Still, much of the public is only vaguely aware of this fact. That’s just one example of an opportunity to educate while positioning the business as a “responsible citizen” working toward a better future.
Another example is that we generate our own clean power through rooftop solar - in fact, we’re a net exporter of electricity. These are just a couple of examples, but the point is that it’s important to communicate the values that the business embodies to forge connections and build relationships with potential customers who share those values.
On the Lookout for Opportunities
While I intend to keep my product lineup simple, one addition I’m considering is a CBD-infused pet treat. CBD for pets is a big and growing market. The global CBD pet market was estimated at $196 million in 2022 and is expected to grow over 30% annually from 2023 to 2030. To be perfectly frank, the same CBD oil you buy for people can be added to pet food, so the “pet CBD” distinction is more about labeling than anything else, but having a ready-to-eat infused treat is certainly convenient. Right now I’m in discussions with a local holistic pet food manufacturer to see about a potential partnership. I think it's important to look for unanticipated opportunities like this.
What’s So Special About the Product?
To further differentiate my business, I need to emphasize better the process I use to create CBD products. In the case of most CBD products, the CBD is extracted from the flower and then added to a carrier oil. Some manufacturers will simply buy a powdered “CBD extract” and use that. It’s often hard to know because vendors are not always transparent about their manufacturing process and they don’t have to be. My products are made using a warm-oil extraction, in which the whole flower is steeped in warm coconut oil. This means the oil contains not just CBD but also all the terpenes, flavonoids, and other beneficial compounds the flower contains. Research shows that these various compounds work synergistically together and create a more potent medicine that can be more effective at lower dosages than products made from extracted CBD isolate. I need to better explain this special infusion process and why it makes a better product than many of the CBD products out there.
The Uncertain Future
The CBD market is evolving and changing as it grows, so keeping up with developments and consumer preferences and being adaptable and nimble will be important for longevity in this industry. To complicate things further, the regulatory environment for CBD is unstable, to put it mildly, and the rules of the game could be very different if/when the FDA decides to really regulate CBD. There’s no way to predict the outcome, of course. Still, I try to stay abreast of what’s happening, and what various advocates and stakeholders are pushing for in hopes that my business can navigate this uncertain landscape into the future.
I don’t have any magic formula for success and am still learning what works and what doesn’t. But if there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that growing the crop and crafting the products is just half the job. The other crucial half is identifying who will buy your product and why, getting the product in front of them, and conveying the key attributes that establish trust, commonality, and, ideally, an ongoing relationship.
Ed Geis grows organic hemp in Maine and crafts Bald Mountain Botanicals CBD products, https://baldmountainbotanicals.com/ and can be found at the Farmers Market in Camden Maine.
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