(liquid splashing) (light upbeat music) - From about November of 2018, all you had to do was throw the seed in the dirt, keep it wet, and by the time it was 18 inches tall, there would be 50 people outside your ranch offering to buy your field.

(upbeat music) - We are a new age order of nuns.

We're "Sisters of the Valley."

We call ourselves sisters, but we qualify as nuns because we live together, work together, pray together and take vows.

- We are conduits of this plant and this plant has made an impact on all of us here.

- Right now, CBG smokable flower is around $900 a pound.

I could make a pound, every three or four plants.

- Mother nature, creator God, had a plan for this plant.

- We have 10,000 customers who spend $100 a year with us, every year, for their CBD package of pain relief.

That's a million dollar a year business between six women and two men that work this one acre farm.

- The market is not yet in the consumables where you can ingest this on a retail level.

And when that happens you'll see that CBD is literally everywhere.

- Here, let me find the one that's more rough.

This is sometimes how it comes.

- Once somebody tries the salve, hemp, the CBD salve for their arthritis and the arthritis goes away, they become the champion for this medicine.

- We learned a lot in a very short period of time.

23 acres that we have last year was a handful.

- Once we got the hopper full then we gonna (indistinct) from the sacks.

- That will do the whole unloading process, I think.

- We make the tea that you just make tea out of but also people can smoke it to get off of their harmful tobacco or smoke it if they're trying to get off of meth or anything harmful.

- And this plant doesn't know gender, it doesn't know color.

It doesn't care how old you are.

It just works.

It's magic.

(upbeat music) - 14 months ago, distillate THC 3 was $14,000 a kilo and 14 months later, 14,000 to 1500.

That's how fast the market crashed.

- We have the sort of political force that does all it can to pollute the true meanings behind these plants and what's going on - For 2020-2021.

We believe that we can acquire five to $15,000 an acre margins in 120 day crop.

(light upbeat music) - We are the conduits and that just, it doesn't just mean making the medicine.

It means being the voice for the plant.

- [Announcer] Production and funding for American grown, my job depends on Ag.

Provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition and crop care advice and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America, by providing Ag financial services.

By Brandt, professional agriculture.

Proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world everyday.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural Central California, keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the central Valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow our nation's food.

(upbeat music) ♪ I came from the mud ♪ ♪ There's dirt on my hands ♪ ♪ Strong like a tree ♪ ♪ There's roots where I stand ♪ ♪ Oh, I've been running from the Law ♪ ♪ Hope they won't shoot me down soon ♪ (upbeat music) - The difference between marijuana and hemp.

They're both the same plant.

(upbeat music) All cannabis or marijuana plants have the genetic predisposition to produce over 75 compounds depending upon whether it's a maple or a (indistinct) will determine whether it produces more THC than the other 70 compounds, or whether it produces more CBD than the other compounds or whether it produces one of the other 70 compounds over the two that I just mentioned.

We're so new into the genetics and understanding this plant since it was outlawed in 1935, that science has jumping back in and literally every six months, we're discovering an entire new layer of compounds and an entire new dimension of how these compounds react in the human body as compared to the conventional pharmaceutical drugs that we currently use.

That with one drug, you get four or five side effects.

What's different about the compounds of cannabis is that they're saying that these compounds produce no side effects, only effects.

(upbeat music) ♪ will you find me ♪ ♪ Hope you find me ♪ - To be scholarly on this subject.

If you look it up, hemp equals cannabis and cannabis equals hemp.

They are the same plant genus, but if you wanna know the difference between marijuana and hemp or marijuana and cannabis, they're all the same thing.

They're all the same plant genus but here's the difference legally.

Legally, if your crop, let's just call it a plant, and you can call it marijuana or cannabis or have, if your crop is under 0.3% THC, it is now hemp, according to the UN and according to the U S. You cannot get high from anything that has less than four to 5% THC.

And the federal government has set the bar at 10% of that.

And we've set our own bar at 10% below that.

So the fact is you can't get high from hemp made or CBD products from any plant that qualifies as hemp based on the THC level of 0.3%.

You just can't get high on that.

(upbeat music) (string music) - From about November of 2018 up through June of 2019, concurrent to the passing of the Farm Bill, concurrent to the California Department of Food and Agriculture approving hemp to be grown in the central San Joaquin Valley which happens to be the largest Ag region in the world.

It created a sense of excitement that began with the publicity followed up by a Cod great of seed salesman.

I'm talking hundreds, hundreds of seed salesman that came to the central San Joaquin Valley from all over the United States offering to sell magic seeds that for anywhere from 75 cents to a $1.25 a piece, all you had to do was throw the seed in the dirt, keep it wet and by the time it was 18 inches tall, there would be 50 people outside your ranch offering to buy your field.

And every grower that had an extra sack of cash because they had done good in almonds or pistachios or tomatoes, or garlic, said, "why would I not risk a little bit of cash with magic beans on ground I already own?"

- We were looking at it.

There was an awful lot of hype about growing hemp.

And certainly in the dollar value, it surely made a lot of attention to draw growers into looking at it because it has such a high value or promise of a high value.

- Tom, on the other hand, had some experience in understanding about what that business was when we took the position that this is interesting, but it's a very unknown market despite all the hype of high value.

And so we grew about 25 acres last year.

The reality of what that experiment brought to us was that he was a very chaotic market, almost a wild West of marketing with changing players and changing assumptions and changing end-use that if you didn't know what you were doing, it's pretty treacherous.

(string upbeat music) - We created this order six years ago by getting a farm and getting into the hemp business.

And our mission really is to create honorable, spiritual, jobs for women, to provide plant-based medicine to the people, and to, the wearing of the uniform represents the fact that we know plant-based medicine and plant-based diets.

(string upbeat music) Well, by the time the Farm Bill came, I was already three years.

The sisterhood was three years old.

We were already making a line of hemp-based products and shipping them around the world, for three years.

And what was disturbing is that, of course, we were doing it ahead of everybody.

The regulation wasn't there.

So we were persecuted.

And then what was most disturbing about the Hemp Farm Bill is that California didn't immediately say, "yes we wanna participate."

That was crazy.

So we didn't really get protection from that but still, of course, we celebrated because it's a move in the right direction.

It was something.

The number one thing people use our products for is to get off their pills.

If you wanna break that category down it's super interesting that the oil from the hemp plant acts in a way that is intelligent and cooperative and collaborative.

And the reason I say that is because people report equally that they take our gel caps to help them go to bed.

And they take our gel caps to help them wake up in the morning.

So, that tells me that that oil is an adaptive sort of medicine to what you need.

And that's we call it intelligent.

- We make our medicines by the cycles of the moon.

So, from a new moon to a formal, right now, we're in a new moon to full moon period.

So, she's got a lot of medicine making, going up on, up at the Gaia enclave North of us.

And we have a lot of medicine making going on here now.

So we concentrate it in two weeks a month.

And then there's two weeks between that period when all the items are off to the test lab to be tested, everything's being labeled, everything's being inspected and checked before we get the test results back and then we can do a final blessing and move it to ship it.

- I look at success at how many people we touch every day with the plant.

I don't look at it at the dollars that hit us, hit the bank account, right?

Although, gosh, that's wonderful because that gives us more capacity to bring in more sisters, to do more training to foster more media (sister laughing) on the mother farm, right?

And to also pull and to also be activists.

Really truly, what we bring in fosters and fuels our activism which is such an integral part of who we are.

- We sell the gel caps, but we also sell tinctures.

We sell CBD in many forms.

The topical salve was the shocker to us.

We did not expect people would get rid of their sleeping pills by rubbing our salve on their temples, at night.

We believe that cannabis is like honey and local is best.

And that science will one day prove that hemp grown locally has more healing for the local people than if it was grown far away.

So ultimately, we wanna quit having our products travel and we want to have enclaves all around the world so that all of our products are made locally.

You've heard of weed maps, right?

If you can do weed maps, we hope to have an app for the Sisters products that people can get them locally, and they don't have to make the products burn fossil fuels to travel.

(light upbeat music) - When you go back to the history of hemp and marijuana in general, around 1925, 1930, Henry Ford was building up to build the model T Ford and he was running into a shortage of steel.

He was running into a shortage of rubber and he was concerned about a fuel source.

So he was approached by a scientist that brought him hemp where he found out that hemp fiber is the strongest fiber in the United States.

And that he could make carbon fiber automobile bodies that were 50% lighter than steel.

He could take hemp and he could extract the oils from it and then turn that into rubber to make tires for his car.

And he could take hemp and run it through an ethanol light plant and turn gasoline out of it, as well.

When Rockefeller and DuPont understood that Ford was trying to do a workaround, Rockefeller and DuPont lobbied Congress to outlaw marijuana as an illegal drug removing the industrial applications away from Henry Ford so that he was now bound to them for steel and rubber and fuel.

(light upbeat music) - The first wave of seed salesman came through here and sold (beeping) lot of seeds.

They took the money and they left.

So then the farmers had their magic seeds and they all brainstormed around their campfires about who had the best magic seeds.

And so some of them took him to the nursery and found out that half of the magic seeds were no good.

Some of them planted them directly in the field and found out they were no good.

In either case, they both had bad outcomes.

So after they realized that the magic seeds were only half good, they bought another half more of better magic seeds.

So they could finish planting their five acres or 10 acres or in some case, some growers planted 160 acres.

Some growers planted a thousand acres.

Some growers had so much money, they planted 2000 acres of magic seeds.

And by the time the magic seeds turned into magic plants.

They had magic males and the magic males pollinated their version females that weren't supposed to be there with males and they ended up with what my dad would call chicken salad that had transitioned in the chicken.

(beeping) - This is a female and a male plant within the same plant.

See.

That is a female and a male.

That's the male pollen and that's the female plant, all in the same.

And that is a real, real no-no in what I'm doing because you don't want any pollen to contaminate these virgins that are all around here that I don't want any seed at all.

So you see what I did right there.

What I just did was took the next door neighbor's kid and covered him up with dirt.

Okay.

That's what I did.

(man laughing) - [Man] That's what while I'm taking care of Junior.

- Come on.

- The end buyer for all of this CBD raw product was promised, by the seed salesman when you bought their seed and they gave you the business card of the lab that was gonna give you the contract for $25 a pound to buy your biomass.

And by the time you bought the seed and you planted it, three months later, when you got ready to consummate your contract with your processor, you found out that he was out of business.

He could not afford to buy your flower at $25 a pound.

And he was just the brother-in-law to the seed salesman, anyway.

(light upbeat music) - I think a lot of the growers who had grown this product already at 19, had a somebody that was gonna market for them.

And in many cases disappeared.

And, cause that's how unknown, how volatile the market is.

And I think that understanding what you're dealing with and what we are capable of doing is even more important dealing with the end user because you gotta go through the chaos of everybody in between.

And it's hurt a lot of growers.

Some growers may have done, okay.

It's probably got some growers say, "I'll never grow CBD again" because the market lacks stability.

Part of that is because the government is indeterminate about what they wanna do.

And regulations that we have to follow.

- This is a person, this is a person, this is a person.

(glass knocking) So, with every pour, I infuse all of my powerful intentions of goodness and healing and benefits for the person, the soul that is getting the salve.

(liquid splashing) (light upbeat music) - Well, I started using cannabis products in high school.

So, I was diagnosed with ADD when I was 10 and I was on Adderall for a number of years during my adolescence which is maybe not as beneficial to my cognitive health, but regardless, it's what I did.

And then towards kind of the middle of high school I started using CBD and I actually stopped using my Adderall shortly after that.

And I felt that the CBD would really help my brain function the way it was supposed to.

I had a lot of issues with, you know, blanking out during exams and just like, I wasn't even able to do math in my head.

And now, you know, I'm a graduate with an Economics degree and I'm an analyst.

And I work with numbers all the time.

- Before, a hundred years ago, every child and every adult would have cannabis from their local herbalist or doctor at least three to five times before they're 40 years old.

And now we wonder it all these odd, strange diseases that our kids are coming along with.

Weird brain neurology diseases.

Well, We don't wonder about that 'cause we think starving the endocannabinoid system for three generations has created incredibly bizarre diseases coupled with the fact that we live inside plastic Ziploc bags, when you look at all the plastic that's in our houses.

But we firmly believe that this separation away from the cannabis plant as something sacred and adaptive and also normal, just normal to have in a doctor's or an herbalists case has really hurt humanity.

And we're all playing catch-up now.

(upbeat music) - You're standing in the middle of a licensed, registered industrial, commercial hemp grow in Fresno County.

- This is my most valuable variety in the entire field.

So, do your best, make sure your belts are tight (man laughing) and make sure no hose is leaking.

- This guy has done a whole bunch hemp bach East.

He says, this is the way to go.

- Alrighty.

- When we look at the yields and the conversions we grew 25 acres last year, and of the 25 acres, that produced approximately close to 50 to 60,000 pounds of pure flower.

And of the flower, we took half of it to smokable.

And the other half we took to laboratories that ended up producing close to 600 liters of finished CBD oil.

So in terms of what is our vision, our vision is that within 25 acres, we can produce a sufficient supply of flower and our oil to supply most of the manufacturers and the people that we're negotiating with.

And, eventually, if we're able to get into our own retail line, then twenty-five acres will produce really quite a bit of a finished goods for what we need in the market that we're prepared to go.

(upbeat music) (squeaking noise) - So what I'm gonna show you now is hemp flower that was harvested in October and November of last year and has been stored in these atmosphere controlled totes that have permeable membranes built into the lids so that we can control the amount of moisture and air flow through the flower.

(lid opening) You can see that this flower, although it's been in here since October, November of last year, still has the structure, still has the bud structure, and is still firm, good integrity, and it's still at about, I'm gonna say eight to 10% moisture.

- [Interviewer] Now, are a lot of people doing this?

- No.

This was a decision that was made on the day of harvest that said, we can either go to biomass and chip it and put it in tote sacks.

And if we don't sell it or take it to oil within three or four months, then it's gonna start to deteriorate or we can manicure it, mechanically, trim it put it into the stable totes.

And now what we have here is smokable flower, which is worth between 500 and $300 a pound, as opposed to biomass that's worth a $1.25, a pound.

(light upbeat music) - How we get the pure plant, the plant to turn into just oil up the plant.

That's the question?

Is we soak the plant in alcohol, then we strain the plant off of it.

Then we cook the alcohol until the alcohol, all goes off.

And what you're left with is a pure oil of the plant.

- What we hear from people, daily, we hear from people.

I get emails and I get messages, daily, that I'm always fostering.

It's that one-on-one interaction that allows us to see the fruits of our labor.

The passion that comes from working with such an intelligent plant.

- The fact is that when you get a group of people working together on the same march, no matter what it is, I think whether you're creating a film or putting out a play to get a message to the people, when you're working with other people and you're all on the same mission, that is a healing act by itself.

So, I feel like we're growing a little younger through the work we do, because it is so super rewarding too to be hearing from people who their daughter's no longer suffering from seizures.

I mean, we get stories every day.

We get stories from the man who 90 days did nothing else when the brain tumor was diagnosed on his brain he did nothing else, but take our tincture, he told us, and 90 days later it was nearly gone and the doctors just said, you're making it go away on your own.

Keep doing what you're doing.

This is very gratifying work for us.

And we don't claim to be nurses.

But what we do claim is that we're humble women who farm and take the efforts of our farming and turn that into plant-based medicine that we can share with the world.

And, yes, we heal through doing the healing work.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Production funding for American grown, my job depends on Ag, provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition and crop care advice, and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America, by providing Ag financial services.

By Brandt, professional agriculture, proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world everyday.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural Central California, keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years, proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families to grow our nation's food.

(upbeat music) (light upbeat music)