As Iowa farmers have faced a variety of woes the last several years, a Stuart family decided to expand their operation to a plant that was recently made legal to grow in the state.

Greg Dudley says his family began deliberating how to make a living in January of 2019 as their way of life was beginning to look dire, “We raise corn and soybeans and we also feed cattle, and I’m kind of a firm believer that for family farms these days to be successful at all you gotta be a little more diversified than what people want to be. So that’s kind of how we got into it, we sat down and thought, ‘How can we diversify our operation a little bit?’ And it was kind of funny how it worked out, like a week later that’s when our grandpa sent us this article about hemp and we thought, ‘Well, that might be kind of something that’s interesting to look into.”

The article was about American Hemp Ventures, a seed company out of Aurora, Colorado. The Dudleys contacted them and decided to form a partnership with the company and with their Rittgers family relatives to grow hemp seeds in southern Minnesota. The families would stay at Lake Okoboji on weekends to travel across the border to grow these seeds for farmers. As hemp production is now open for Iowa farmers this spring, Greg hopes the stigma around the plant will continue to diminish, “I get asked a lot, ‘So you guys are the pot farmers, right?’ And I’m like no, hemp is part of the cannabis family, but it’s a big difference because it doesn’t have any of the psychoactive effects that marijuana actually has.”

The company has also expanded to sell cannabidiol products like oils, creams, gummies, and dog treats exclusively online through their brand Altru Hemp. Greg hopes the CBD laws in Iowa will eventually change so they can sell these products in stores, and that they can move their greenhouses in the coming years entirely to Iowa. To hear more about Altru Hemp, listen to a two-part Let’s Talk Guthrie County program on air and at racconvalleyradio.com.