By Mary Nelen and Elizabeth Gabriel
“There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought…...”
-Wendell Berry
For some, farming is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a path that must be followed. For a young Black woman from Vermont, it was intuition. “In a world that feels dying, it makes the most sense to grow,” said Arantha Farrow when asked what inspired her interest in farming.
Arantha is a 32-year-old citizen of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, “I have always had an affinity with the cannabis plant and its expansive adaptogenic properties. In a way, I feel like I am a sister to the plant itself,” she says. “ Our stories have intersected so much.”
When Arantha was four years old, her father, a Black man from Zimbabwe, applied for a green card to stay in the U.S. with his family. Yet, when immigration officials saw that he'd once been detained for an eighth of an ounce of marijuana, he was instead deported. Farrow and her younger brother, who was two then, wouldn't see him again for another 20 years.
Much of Arantha’s inspiration comes from the Cannabaceae (aka “weed”) family and their parallel stories. As a brown-skinned person in the second whitest state in the country, she often feels like a weed and is all too familiar with racism. All the way back in middle school, she endured verbal and physical harassment and regularly was called the “N” word. Fortunately, a single teacher helped Arantha realize how wrong this abuse was. She realized that she was targeted because of her skin color, that this was the same racial profiling her dad had experienced decades prior, and most importantly, that she could do something about it. Since then, she’s devoted her life to reuniting with her father and helping starving people in Zimbabwe through her passion for agriculture.
In January 2018, Vermont became the first state to legalize marijuana through an act of legislature rather than a ballot initiative. Bill H. 511 was signed into law by Republican governor Phil Scott, which allows for the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana, as well as two mature and four immature plants. After that, there was what some farmers and citizens now call a free-for-all. Vermont had become the State with the loosest regulations in the country. At the time, you could grow unlimited acreage of CBD hemp for just a $25 license fee (today, a license to cultivate the plant outside ranges from $750 to $34,000 per year, depending on how many plants there are). Arantha said that the same license in California cost $50,000 at the time, and in Texas, you had to prove you had $500k in the bank to grow hemp. Expecting the market to boom quickly, Vermont became the center of attention from national and international investors who now wanted to grow acres and acres of hemp to help the state - and themselves - dominate the cannabis industry. Yet, these (mainly) large-scale companies were not integrating with local communities, not using good farming practices and many had no experience with the plant or agriculture.
“What you had was a series of growers, who perhaps never grew hemp before, and decided that there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” said Jane Kolodinsky, a UVM economics professor, in an interview with Vermont Public.
Meanwhile, small-scale Vermont farmers with experience were also interested in this blossoming industry.
It’s important to note that while science doesn’t differentiate between “hemp” and “marijuana,” two different names for cannabis, a type of flowering plant in the Cannabaceae family, the law does. The critical difference between the two is the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content. “Hemp” is cannabis that contains 0.3 percent or less THC content by dry weight and is either grown as “industrial hemp” (used for fiber) or for its high CBD content and medicinal properties. “Marijuana” refers to cannabis that has more than 0.3 percent THC by dry weight.
The new law was an opportunity for both business and reparations for Arantha, who has spent her adult life as an advocate and ally in the Vermont cannabis industry.
After spending a few years on cannabis farms out west, Arantha started Caledonia Cannabis in Vermont soon after the 2018 bill came into effect. She had eight products to offer, including CBD joints, cannabis-infused edibles such as lollipops, pre-rolls, honey and maple hard-candy infused, shatter (hemp oil), and various teas when a conference called the “New England Cannabis Convention Series” (NECANN) came to Essex Junction, a small town outside Burlington. Most of her inventory sold out.
“We did really well at the convention,” Arantha says. “The exposure for Caledonia Cannabis was great - or so I thought.”
In 2018, the newly formed 3-person Cannabis Control Board (CCB) in the Vermont statehouse was developing the rules around licensure and contacted her for insight into the industry. Arantha consulted with them about how to develop legislation with respect to cannabis and co-ops. They also put her in touch with the National Association of Cannabis Business.
“Things were looking promising,” she shares. “People asked me for input into this industry, which I cared so much about. I felt seen, respected, and excited for what this could mean for Vermont farmers, but looking back, I was being used in many instances.”
She now knows that while she was being asked for free information based on years of experience, the board members are compensated for their time.
During this same window of time, a new-to-Vermont processor, impressed by Arantha, her connections and her capacity, connected the young woman with a group of Chinese investors. That was the beginning of the summer of the 50-acre grow.
Although contracts and legal representation were attempted by both parties at the outset, the work took on momentum with Arantha at the helm. She was given a hefty down payment of $10,000 in cash, with $40,000 promised in return for particulars on growing acres and acres of this now-popular plant.
The investors wanted detailed information - and they wanted it immediately - about the exact growing requirements and the cost to grow 100 acres of CBD hemp in multiple scenarios: if we grew the starts or bought them, if we rented land or bought land, how many laborers and labor hours were needed, equipment needs, and so on,” she said.
Arantha drafted a spreadsheet with quotes for everything the investors requested and anything else she knew would be needed for the business. She also did all the leg work and relationship-building required to make it happen. She worked upwards of 90 hours weekly and saw the opportunity with investors as a collaboration - that working with these kinds of resources could bring the needed equipment into the state so small farmers like herself could access it and have a chance to be successful in the industry. According to Vermont Public, more than a thousand farmers grew CBD hemp in that first year.
Within a month, Arantha found two small vegetable farms in the Northeast Kingdom, Underhill and Wolcott. Each provided 25-30 acres. In addition, she sourced a nursery with the capacity for large orders that could provide the 75,000 seedlings they needed. $132,000 was paid to the seed nursery from an escrow account held by the investors.
During the first week of June, tilling began at both farms. According to Arantha, the investors put on so much pressure that there was no time to test the soil, have it reviewed by the State University soil lab, and then fertilize and amend it. “We were moving too fast,” she says.
Ian Murphy owns 150 acres at the Wolcott farm. He mainly worked the 30 acres of his property for the 50-acre project.
“We planted a lot of CBD hemp, about 1200 to 1600 plants per acre, a rather hefty amount,” he says. “The plants did well.”
He adds that due to mold challenges, he would limit hemp planting to 1200 per acre in the future.
But, a few weeks later, Arantha discovered there were both male and female plants in the fields - a huge problem. The nursery owner took responsibility and advised they immediately pick
all the males or the whole crop would be seeded.
“Each male plant had to be extracted from the fields at both farms,” said Arantha. “I taught workers how to distinguish males from females.”
At about five weeks, a male plant expresses itself. If it’s allowed to, the pollen from the male will open and engage with a female flower bud for reproduction instead of the female plant becoming the most robust blossom for the desired product (THC or CBD).
“The crew and I had to walk the fields daily to look for males because they pollinate at different times. We pulled around 8,000 male plants over the next few weeks to make up for the mistake. Ours was one of many farms that got seedlings from this nursery, and all of them had the same issue,” said Arantha. “The time and labor to correct this error were tremendous and costly.”
The nursery owner did his best to make it right by giving us another 10,000 plants, but that meant a lot more work for us, and way too late in the season. “He also gave us additional seeds to compensate for the problem, but it was too late in the season to plant them,” says Arantha.
Planning ahead, Arantha told the investors that Plenum drying machines or a conveyor belt drying machine would be needed for this quantity of harvest. However, this recommendation was rejected because of cost. Instead, she was given drying machines with 16 stainless steel trays.
“They arrived late, all made in China with instructions in Chinese, so we couldn’t even figure out how to use them,” she said. “Electricians had to be brought in to modify the electrical access to work with our outlets.”
After failing to work with the Chinese machinery, Arantha had to scramble to find barns they could rent to hang dry the entire crop before the frost when it could mold in the fields. Barns are traditionally used for drying hemp on a much smaller scale, but so many in Vermont grew hemp that year empty barns were hard to find.
“I found us two old barns and an old church where we could dry our product,” says Arantha.
At the end of November, the crew collected the dry material, “bucked it off the stock” (removed the stem), and put the plants in garbage bags.
Meanwhile, Arantha still had not been paid for her work. “I’d get a check for $3,000 or $5,000 to pay for some supplies and my 12 employees, but never enough to pay myself.” Although she’s involved lawyers, she’s still owed more than $40,000.
When Arantha’s contract with the investors was up in December, she walked away.
Moving Forward
Despite her experience with the investors, Arantha’s passion for this plant remains. By now, she had witnessed that small farmers had much less interest in CBD farming. Competing with multinational corporations was nearly impossible and everything from growing to manufacturing to retailing to consumer demand never gelled in the state, making it difficult for small farmers to succeed. She has always known a cooperative business structure for cannabis production would be the only way small farmers could make it work.
Small farmers were committed to preserving their relationship to the plant and to the land, and this is who Arantha wants to work with and who she wants to partner with. She went to meetings with the Vermont Hemp Growers Coop and worked with other folks to figure out how to approach designing a cooperative. Through that exploration, she met mentors like Bruce from Riverside Farm and Deep Roots Organic, a cooperative vegetable farm. She continued to meet simultaneously while working on the project for the investors, knowing this was part of her long-term vision.
“I learned so much from Bruce. Knowing others had done this [cooperative] type of set-up before and that it worked for them, I felt hopeful it could work for us too,” she shares.
Arantha dove in. She went to New York City to connect with stores selling bulk flower and who could and would buy from the newly forming co-op of 10 Vermont farmers. She also found stores to sell the full-spectrum CBD tincture products she made under her Caledonia Cannabis label. It didn’t take long to build promising connections, but then COVID-19 hit, and everything shut down.
“I knew I had to transition my business to another model,” she says.
Arantha and her close friend and partner Fern Feather had been brainstorming business ideas already. Fern had dirt and a greenhouse, and Arantha had tilled land, seeds and previously used trays from the big project. They both had an equally ambitious passion for growing. When Arantha stumbled upon an old trolley for sale on Craigslist, she fell in love immediately.
“It was so beautiful,” she said.
“It was white with wooden adornments. I knew Fern and I could transform it into a mobile CBD retail shop and that it was the perfect Covid solution. We could fill it with the plants we grew and drive around Vermont and even into New York City - ring the trolley bell, and people could come by our products.”
Fern and Arantha did exactly that. Their first season, 2020, was a successful one. They would take it to the Burlington Market every week and people loved it - both customers and the press. The trolley and Arantha were featured in several Vermont newspapers around this time, announcing Arantha’s success.
But when the team went to fire up “Cannaboose” in 2021, it wouldn’t turn on - the mechanics didn’t work. They were lucky to find a mechanic to fix it, though it took some time, so meanwhile, they fixed up the inside in all the ways they dreamed, down to installing rainbow glass in the ceiling. Yet, as Fern and Arantha were readying for their 2022 season, Fern was fatally and randomly stabbed.
“It was impossible for me to keep my focus on the business after this tragedy. This was our collective dream; he was my friend and my partner, and it felt impossible to move on without him,” she shares while sobbing.
Arantha’s attention shifted to her dad, who, despite being deported for an amount of marijuana that is far less than the legal possession amount today, still hasn’t been able to return to the US. She’s actively raising money for the community where her father lives to support them in growing and having healthy food, shelter, and artisans' livelihoods there.
Arantha says she still has the trolley, and though a big part of her still wants to stay in the cannabis business, it’s so easy to feel disempowered by it - by how her father was and still is treated by the state, to her experience with the investor to seeing how few small-scale entrepreneurs are able to find success in it, especially Black people like herself.
“This is what I meant when I said ‘I felt like a weed,’ she says, “I felt unwelcome growing in Vermont, but I am able to see now that a weed is still a flower. I just have to work really hard - harder than I should, it feels like - to flower into what I want to be.”
In every single state, Black folks are more likely to be arrested for a cannabis-related offense and have been promised, over and over, some type of reparations for this impact. Besides feeling powerless, “it’s also so hard to navigate all the regulations and costs now,” Arantha explains.
While Vermont and many other States have a “Social Equity” program that prioritizes reviewing license applications from specific “disadvantaged” communities over non-social equity applications, little has been done to address the enormous capital required to start a cannabis business - whether as a grower or a manufacturer. Vermont, Massachusetts and New York are among those states that have set up some type of fund to provide grants and loans to social equity businesses, but none of the funds are adequate when compared to the need.
Arantha’s application for a manufacturer license is pending with the CCB (the same board with which Arantha helped develop initial regulations). Ideally, she would like to apply for a cooperative growing license, but the process has not been clear. She’s also asking the CCB for reparations for her father’s deportation in 1995 and continued exile.
To learn more about Arantha’s story and her work in Vermont and Zimbabwe, visit arantha.info.
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