Overview:
A farming and small business network called Purely Appalachia is looking toward a day when Virginia will have a legal cannabis marketplace.
Since its height in 2020, the “green rush” to grow hemp in Southwest Virginia has slowed to a standstill as falling prices eventually made harvesting pointless, but that hasn’t stopped local growers from seeking to stake their claim in what they hope will eventually be Virginia’s new legal cash crop: cannabis.
With bipartisan efforts in the state legislature making to the governor’s desk, it looked possible that the 100-plus members of the farming and small business network Purely Appalachia might be growing and selling cannabis in Southwest Virginia very soon.
But Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s recent veto of HB 698 and SB 448 means the group’s hopes will be stalled, at least until his term ends. Purely Appalachia founder Heather Langston said the two bills, while not identical, were similar in involving small business owners and local communities in cannabis production. Currently, legal medicinal marijuana production and distribution is dominated by four or five large multistate operators, she said.
“This was entirely a Glenn Youngkin decision. There’s a lot of support from legislators and people in Virginia for us to open up a recreational cannabis industry,” Langston said. “We are trying to encourage friends and neighbors to find resilience that goes past one political person.”
On March 28, the governor’s office reported Youngkin’s actions on 107 bills, prioritizing the announcement of his veto of the cannabis market legalization “that would endanger Virginians, especially children.”
“The proposed legalization of retail marijuana in the commonwealth endangers Virginians’ health and safety. States following this path have seen adverse effects on children’s and adolescent’s health and safety, increased gang activity and violent crime, significant deterioration in mental health, decreased road safety and significant costs associated with retail marijuana that far exceed tax revenue,” Youngkin wrote in his veto statement.
In 2021, Virginia became the first Southern state to legalize marijuana, adopting a policy change that allowed adults age 21 and up to possess and cultivate the drug for personal use. CBD products, derived from hemp, are legal to sell in Virginia provided they contain less than 0.3% THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana.
Langston said regional shop owners have trouble understanding the current laws surrounding cannabis and are “very confused as to what’s legal and what’s not and what products they can buy that are regulated.”
Jessica Kiser, Purely Appalachia’s director of community outreach, said that lack of regulation is what caused the oversaturation of the hemp market, effectively wiping out the agribusiness before it really got started. She and Langston, her sister, have been hoping Virginia’s legal cannabis market doesn’t meet the same fate.
Youngkin’s veto stated that the legislation, which aimed to create a legal path to market for recreational marijuana and set up a regulatory agency to oversee it, would not “eliminate the illegal black-market sale of cannabis, nor guarantee product safety. Addressing the inconsistencies in enforcement and regulation in Virginia’s current laws does not justify expanding access to cannabis, following the failed paths of other states and endangering Virginians’ health and safety.”
Langston disagrees. “Advocating for a thriving legal cannabis market not only meets the immediate need for jobs but also promotes the production of safe consumable products,” she said. “We want opportunity in Southwest Virginia and we also want to protect our citizens. Having a regulated product does both.”
But even with those plans stopped for now, Langston does not see this as the end for Purely Appalachia. “I think the biggest thing about cannabis, or any other industry, is having the momentum and having the resources, capital and all that to get going and keep going,” she said.
* * *
Actually, keeping going is how Purely Appalachia formed in the first place.
Langston and her husband, who live in Bristol, started a trucking business in 2017 making small deliveries of farm machinery to sellers and buyers.
Then in 2020 she saw that National Hemp had popped up in Russell County. She knew that Congress had passed the Hemp Farming Act in 2018, making it legal to grow industrial hemp with a THC concentration of less than 0.3%, removing it from the list of Schedule I controlled substances.
National Hemp took the lead in organizing local farmers to participate in the hemp industry with hopes that it would be a sustainable crop, Langston said.
And, in 2020, National Hemp did seem to get into hemp production at the right time. In that year hemp production was highest statewide.
The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services reported that approximately 2,190 acres were planted in 2019, increasing to 2,205 acres in 2020.
But now the acreage is a fraction of what it was.
Planting reports for 2023 show approximately 660 acres were planted in hemp, said Michael Wallace, spokesperson for VDACS.
And the number of hemp growers shrank by an even larger margin. In 2019 and 2020, VDACS issued approximately 1,200 industrial hemp grower registrations. Wallace said that as of March 31 of this year, only 159 industrial hemp grower registrations were active in the state, and those numbers may soon decline further.
“As planting season has just begun, it is too soon to know how many of the registered industrial hemp growers will plant hemp this year. Growers must submit planting reports within 14 days of planting hemp,” Wallace said.
The central region of the state has the most hemp farms registered, at about 23%. About 12% are in Southwest Virginia; of those, about half are in Washington and Russell counties. The other counties host no more than two hemp fields each.
In 2019, hemp was selling for $3,000 per kilo. Last year, growers were lucky to get $70 per kilo. Local harvests are either sitting in barns or are too expensive to harvest and are just destroyed by fire, Langston said.
“In hindsight, maybe hemp could have worked for us if we’d had our eye on a different product [such as clothing or paper fiber],” she said.
In 2020, Langston made friends with one of National Hemp’s contracted farmers. “And then as soon as she harvested her crop, it was about the time that prices plummeted,” Langston said. “So I was just heartbroken for all the people who had gotten into it. But it turned out everybody was ready to keep fighting.”
In June 2021, Langston started holding informational sessions on cannabis. She researched the history of the plant and regulations. She interviewed farmers about the growing process and then just gathered questions and got them answered.
“Mostly they wanted to know they were not going to get arrested,” Langston said.
She was also bringing people together.
Kiser characterizes Purely Appalachia as a grassroots community organization made up primarily of generational farmers, new growers and small-business people, but also chemists and even a couple of pastors.
“We had chemists who had worked for King Pharmaceuticals and Sherwin Williams as color manufacturers. We are really excited about getting them into the process,” Langston said. “We have pastors who are very good at community development. I asked them to help to get people involved in a way they want to be involved — that’s healthy and regulated.”
In the beginning, Purely Appalachia members were all at different levels of comfort about moving into the cannabis business.
“We’ve just been waiting for 100% clarity [through legislation] on how we can get involved. It’s too risky for some of our members to make these investments when they’ve lost so much on hemp,” she said.
* * *
After the decline of hemp, National Hemp sold the business and its repurposed car dealership building to Green Mountain Investments, a firm focusing on agriculture. Langston said Green Mountain Investments is one of the private investment capital firms that have expressed interest in investing in her group.
“If recreational marijuana opens up in the rest of the country, we lose our advantage. Virginia is a great market right now because no Southern state surrounding us has recreational cannabis,” Langston said. “I don’t know if it will be as lucrative an investment in two years. If he [Youngkin] had signed it this year, I think we would have had enough capital to lift our group up to create this network we’re talking about. I hope those relationships stay and maybe we can do something in the future.”
She estimates that building the infrastructure to start cannabis production in Southwest Virginia, not just for the member businesses of Purely Appalachia, would require a minimum investment of $100 million, but it would potentially make cannabis the state’s top cash crop.
As Virginia’s largest private industry, agriculture adds more than $82 billion to the state’s economy annually and employs more than 381,800 people, according to VDACS.
Although tobacco is still listed as one of the state’s top five export products, according to VDACS, it falls far behind soybeans as the state’s leading cash crop. Most of Virginia’s agriculture money currently comes from livestock.
If cannabis is never grown legally in Southwest Virginia, Langston said Purely Appalachia will not disband. “Southwest Virginia needs economic development. People need jobs, opportunities and hope. So anything that can bring that hope will be great,” she said.
