A few hours north of Minneapolis–St. Paul, a hockey player-turned-CBD hemp farmer named Patrick Finnegan has his mind set on being part of the leading vanguard of his industry.
Finnegan doesn’t come from a formal farming background (“mostly I grew up in a mining community and everybody had their victory garden,” he says) but he’s taken to the profession with a passion. After retiring from playing hockey in the Netherlands, Finnegan bought and then cleared for himself a plot of land in Two Harbors and set to work building a business growing microgreens. He sold his first crop in 2010, when microgreens were white-hot and restaurateurs couldn’t get enough of them from major suppliers.
When that changed and he found himself out-competed by big restaurant supply trucks, he pivoted in recent years to producing hemp for use in CBD products. His operation is small—a five-acre farm with about 12,000 square feet of greenhouse production and an acre of high-end outdoor full-sun crops—but he aims to set himself apart with the way he grows and processes his crops.
“We still do [microgreens] for a few restaurants in town, but we’re about 90% hemp oil production,” he says. “We do a solventless product. Less than 1% of hemp farmers do a solventless product, so what we’re doing is a little bit more craft.”
Read more at growlermag.com