Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council's Mission to Drive Investment
This week on the podcast we talk to the board of directors of the newly revamped Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council.
Erica Stark, Lori Daytner, Cynthia Petrone-Hudock, Cameron McIntosh and Drew Oberholtzer are active business leaders and advocates for industrial hemp in Pennsylvania.
The council received $150,000 in grant money from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture for Project Invest in PA Hemp, which aims to attract investment in the state’s hemp sector.
Petrone-Hudock, co-owner of Hemp-Alternative in Chester County, said the grant seeks to increase customer awareness of agricultural products.
“We're going to shift our message away from investing in growing hemp, because we've sort of proven in the state that that can get done,” she said, “to investing in sustainable product development through the use of hemp.”
Oberholtzer, co-founder of Coexist Build, a design firm with a line of hempcrete construction products, said the goal of the project is to develop and create a communication strategy that brings “investment into Pennsylvania for Pennsylvania hemp companies, creating partnerships with public and private entities.”
Daytner, vice president of program development at Don Services, the New Castle company that created the Project PA Hemp Home, said the scope of the new project involves education and outreach.
“But,” she said, “there's also the financial and commercial side of it where investors may say, ‘Oh yeah, this piques my interest,’ but investors want numbers. They want an understanding of what's behind the opportunities that are here.”
Petrone-Hudock said “build demand, build demand, build demand” is the key.
From a grain perspective, she said, “we need food ingredient suppliers, we need chefs, we need restaurant owners, we need local food networks to be in it, really embracing hemp. We need fabric dependent businesses to start looking at hemp as an alternative.
“We need builders and designers and architects, and we need homeowners to say, ‘I want to live in an eco-friendly house that's going to be healthy for me.’ Like the whole key here is what's healthy. And if you embed hemp in your lifestyle, you can't go wrong. And so I think it is sort of changing the message and the target, and continuing to build this demand at the consumer level.”
McIntosh, owner of hempcrete construction company Americhanvre, is confident in the project and points to the Ag Department’s support as a major factor in its success.
“Just the fact that our Department of Agriculture is putting up this kind of money specifically for promotion of hemp products grown, manufactured and produced in Pennsylvania — that's success right there,” he said.
Stark, PAHIC chair and executive director of the National Hemp Association, said the council is “the perfect vehicle to make sure that the positive impacts of all of the materials that are created through this grant continue to be implemented and used indefinitely, because our our mission and our goal is to have a robust and vital hemp industry here in PA.”
Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council
Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture's Hemp Program
https://www.agriculture.pa.gov/Plants_Land_Water/hemp/Pages/default.aspx
News Nuggets
Farmers March on Washington to Demand Climate Legislation
Pingree Introduces Bipartisan Bill to End Discriminatory Hemp Policy
https://pingree.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=4507
Why India is losing trillion-dollar hemp economy
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/why-india-is-losing-trillion-dollar-hemp-economy/
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