Soul Addict is one of the first woman-owned CBD brands in the market today launching a sun-grown hemp farm to take on the agricultural side of the industry while also continuing to create a meaningful brand. Located in Western North Carolina the first acre of hemp acre is currently growing on our founder’s family farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains.

Where do you source your CBD products?

We’re all natural and doing it ourselves, babes. As of August 2019 we’re over the moon to share 100% Soul Addict CBD line is sourced from our own organically-grown Hemp Farm located in Connelly Springs, North Carolina.

Unless, that is, we’re supporting our neighboring farming community’s amazing raw Hemp Flower varieties, which we really, really love to do. In that case, we share this on our website on where we source each CBD flower from. 

Where is your farm?

Our farm is located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, about a little less than an hour drive away from Asheville, North Carolina. Our founder, Laura, grew up about 10 minutes away and we grow on an adjacent farm that’s been in her family since the 1950s, so it’s a family-owned business as well as being woman-owned. 

Okay, so what does ‘vertically integrated’ mean?

Basically, we believe good agriculture products come from good farms. You can’t have a ‘good & consciously-growing* farm without transparency. You can’t have a transparent farm without doing it yourself. So…yeah, we did it ourselves. 

Before this, we were always on a mission to be a plant-to-bottle (aka: vertically integrated!) CBD company. Vertically integrated simply means we’re growing the hemp mamas, harvesting the hemp mamas and making some seriously *ah-mazing* craft CBD products from our very own hemp mama’ flowers.  

We have been working on becoming a vertically integrated Hemp CBD company & farm since we were one of the very first women-owned CBD companies to receive their license in North Carolina to grow craft female-flowering hemp under the Federal Hemp Pilot Program in 2017. Before we made that goal a reality, we sourced from both our farm and small farms outside of Denver, Colorado.

How many acres of hemp do you grow to be a vertically integrated hemp CBD company?

We find power in staying small. 

Our founder wanted nothing more than to grow hemp on a small scale with consciousness, creating a line of organically-grown CBD that put people’s health and wellness over profit, always. You could say, we keep it small and we like it that way. 

In 2018, our first hemp season we planted a total of 1 acre for our CBD line. Start small, learn the plant. In 2019, we upped that acreage to 5 acres in order to begin wholesaling our premium hemp flower to fellow conscious and woman-owned hemp brands. We plan on our 2020 season being the same or smaller. 

Your grow organically, but does that mean you’re certified? 

The really amazing and very cool thing about growing hemp- is that it’s been legalized for the first time in 50 years very, very recently. The stigma was and still is very real. We have a lot of feelings about that, but that’s for another time. 

This industry is new, like really n-e-w. We are working on gaining our certification for Oregon Tilth for the third time in our 2020 season. The USDA cert is harder to come about given they’re still processing their rules for organic hemp growing practices. 

We have been seeking our organic certification since 2017 (our first year of growing!), but even then most certifiers were either

1. bombarded with applications + messages from farms who already were certified wanting their cert for their hemp crop so others fell to the wayside OR…
2. Still in the midst of deciding what growing organic hemp *even means*. 

We have high hopes we’ll receive our organic cert for 2020 hemp season without issues and looking forward to finally, proudly having a certification for something we’re already doing with a ton of intention and consciousness. However, we have realized that as the market has grown very quickly, small farms don’t get first dibs if you’re not already a certified organic farm growing something like lettuce, corn, tomatoes, etc.. That said, we’re hopeful this is our year!