My Hemp Journey

My interest in hemp was triggered by a friend in need. John Freeman’s enthusiasm for the future of industrial hemp was the draw as we worked to organize an education event late in 2018. The challenges we faced through planning that first event foretold how challenging this space would be.

I have been an entrepreneur most of my life. I started my first business while I was still in high school, later built and sold a paging company, created websites when the internet was still young, and spent decades working in sales, financial services, marketing, business development, and community-building. My curiosity and enthusiasm have led me down some unusual paths.

Hemp offered a deep pool of learning and quickly became a passion.

After meeting Senator Dan Lauwers a few times, getting to know Blain Becktold, and meeting adventurous farmers at our January 2019 meeting, I was motivated to learn the entire growing process through hands-on action. Our community of growers collaborated and worked to bring crops to market that first year. John, Blain, and I traveled around the state and even out to Iowa to host education events. It was like drinking from a fire hose.

That first grow also brought unexpected attention. The Associated Press visited our one-acre hemp field in Clayton Township to photograph the crop and document Michigan’s first legal hemp season. AP coverage described our small first grow outside Flint as part of the national story of farmers trying to understand hemp after legalization. The story, “Legal hemp, CBD stir more farmers to grow unfamiliar crop,” captured both the promise and the difficulty of that first year. AP also produced video coverage from the project, including footage connected to our harvest and drying process.

Seeing our little acre of hemp become part of a national story reinforced something I was already learning: hemp was bigger than one farm, one product, or one association.

I learned quickly that hemp is not one industry. It is many industries trying to emerge at the same time. Each path was facing a barrier of ignorance and misunderstanding about the plant.

In 2021 — while I was also battling colon cancer — I was approached about launching a hemp plastics company. We produced thousands of hemp Frisbee's for companies promoting their hemp products. Even that company, iHemp Manufacturing, faced banking issues because of our name. Huntington Bank treated us as if we belonged in a CBD-risk category and wanted compliance information about THC content — for a hemp plastic flying disc.

We closed iHemp Manufacturing, just as many ventures in hemp have run out of steam. I continue to use the CBD distillate from my 2019 one-acre grow to make CBD salve for my own use and for friends in my Oldtimers Hockey community. I continue to hear positive stories from Oldtimers Hockey friends who use it as part of staying active on the ice. My CBD products are listed on iHempHarvest.com.

iHemp Michigan is now a 501(c)(6) nonprofit trade association. We have a fantastic board of directors who are active and invested in industry-building. The education task is bigger than any one hemp association.

Marketing and website development is my core business through Advantage Intelligent Marketing, and I’ve collected many domain names in the hemp space. With the availability of agentic AI tools, I decided to leverage available technology to make a major push toward better hemp education. With major federal hemp policy changes approaching in November 2026, education has never been more important.

That is why I created iHemp International.

This site is built to be an industrial hemp intelligence network: a place to track legislation, markets, research, business opportunities, and the evolving story of hemp around the world.

Hemp has been overhyped, misunderstood, restricted, and underestimated. But the plant is still here. The opportunity is still real. And the work now is to separate noise from useful information.

That is the purpose of iHemp International.

To educate.
To connect.
To advocate.
To help build the next chapter of the hemp economy.