Hemp business sprouts from a little girl’s ‘miracle’
Lee Buchanan
editor@thefranklinpress.com
There’s big business brewing at a family farm on Ledford Lake Road, and it all began with a little girl named Abby.
Chrissy and Dustin Brogden had watched their daughter suffer for five years with epileptic seizures so severe and so frequent that their lives were virtually paralyzed.
“We didn’t do anything as a family,” Chrissy said. “[Dustin] or I had to be with her all the time.”
Abby went from medication to medication. Some were helpful, but they all had side effects that outweighed their usefulness.
“They weren’t really sure what kind of epilepsy she had,” Chrissy said. “It wasn’t until later in that journey that her neurologist diagnosed her with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome.”
Lennox-Gastaut syndrome accounts for only 2-5 percent of childhood epilepsies, and most seizures don’t respond to seizure medications.
“She would have the blank-stare seizures, she would have the convulsing seizures, she would have the seizures where her arms would shake,” Chrissy said. “The arm shaking seizures wouldn’t stop. It was like Parkinson’s. It was a constant seizure.”
Down syndrome complicates Abby’s condition and her parents’ ability to help her.
“She doesn’t really express to us, ‘I think I’m about to have a seizure,’” Chrissy said. “As her parents, we had to learn her triggers.”
Finding a miracle
As the Brogdens struggled to maintain any semblance of a normal family life, three or four acquaintances came to them with articles about CBD oil.
“I wasn’t emotionally or mentally in a place to be giving her something like that,” Chrissy said.
When the Brogdens heard CBD, they saw marijuana.
“When we googled CBD, a pot leaf came up,” Dustin said. “We said, ‘no way.’ We were uneducated.”
They didn’t stay uneducated.
“It was August of 2018,” Chrissy said. “Abby was 12 years old, and we had been on this rollercoaster for five years. Even our neurologist had suggested that we try CBD oil. I remember I was praying, and she was bad again. I felt God tell me, ‘I showed you what to do.’ And I remembered the people who told me about CBD.
“We decided the very next day to try her on CBD,” she said. “And within six weeks, she went from 10 to 12 seizures a day to three a month, at most.”
It was life-changing, not just for Abby but for the entire family.
“She’s been able to go back to school, and she enjoys all the things that 13-year-olds enjoy,” Chrissy said.
Abby gets 50 milligrams of oil twice a day, morning and night, applied under her tongue with an eyedropper.
Abby is back in school now at Mountain View Intermediate.
“She was in the class that got to go to Disneyworld,” Chrissy said. “It was amazing, because she went from crawling to the bathroom to getting to go to Disneyworld. I really believe God has worked a miracle in her through that oil.”
The Brogdens even got to take a cruise this past summer, and her parents were amazed to see Abby step up onto the bar and sing karaoke in front of a couple hundred people.
She sang, “This Girl is on Fire.”
New idea takes root
Abby’s miracle sparked a new idea.
Dustin Brogden recalled sitting on the porch of father-in-law Jim Ledford’s house with Jim’s nephew, Zach.
“I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could grow hemp somewhere here?’”
Jim Ledford, the family patriarch who has worked his entire life on the century-old farm on Ledford Lake Road, had a quick reply.
“If it’s a plant, I can grow it,” he said.
“So here we went,” Dustin said. “I started going to seminars and classes and conventions. They said you got to start small, half an acre. It’s really labor intensive.”
His father-in-law had other ideas.
“Jim’s got 40 acres here, and he said, ‘Let’s go big or go home,’” Dustin said. “We had no idea what that would snowball into.”
They bought 5,000 hemp seedlings, called clones, and planted four acres.
“And it was the absolute most labor-intensive thing I have ever done,” Dustin said. “There’s no approved pesticides or sprays. When you get a bug or a fungus, it’s literally just walking through and picking them off. Now a lot of people plant on plastic, but Jim is as old school as they come. He said, ‘Nope, we’re not using plastic. We’re not gonna do it.’
“When you say you’re not going to use plastic, that’s a whole other level of labor with the weeds and the irrigation,” he said. “But it’s his farm, and he knows best. And that’s very apparent when we saw our test results.”
The quality of the hemp they produced in the first crop shocked everyone.
The state does its own tests, and producers are required to send certificates of analysis (COA) to different labs across the country.
“They said that 10 percent’s great, 12 percent is a home run,” Carrion said. “This came back and it was 21 percent. We cultivated four acres of hemp with 21 percent CBD. You can’t tell me God’s hands haven’t been on this entire thing.”
Business plan
The family soon realized they needed help getting into the hemp business.
“I love to work hard, but that’s about as far as I go,” Dustin said. “We knew we had to have somebody to spearhead this thing, to take the ball and run with it.”
Dustin immediately thought of Isaac Carrion, his longtime friend. Carrion worked at Drake Software for 18 years before starting his own tax preparation business.
“We grew up together, graduated high school together,” Carrion said. “We worked at the Sunset [Restaurant] together. But we got busy with life and would just see each other around. But we all live a mile from the farm.”
Carrion spent a few weeks learning about the CBD market and came up with a business plan.
“We can do this,” he told Dustin. “We can raise the money.”
In May they launched LLB Farms, which is owned by Jim Ledford, Dustin Brogden, Carrion and Zach Ledford.
Carrion knew they would need investors. The processing system they needed cost $250,000.
He told potential investors, “’You’ve got something brewing on Georgia Road that’s pretty incredible.’
“We did it in 11 days,” Carrion said.
He found 13 investors, almost all local families.
The process
Tyler Brooks, one of the first investors in Abby’s Angels, explained the extraction process done with the system housed in one section of the small barn at the heart of the business.
“We can run 200 pounds a day,” he said. “There are about 8,500 pounds of biomass stored in the little barn.”
The biomass is ground and then run through the $250,000 processor.
“It’s kind of like a modern-day still,” he said
The extract is then processed into a crude oil that looks like black tar. That is sent to New River in Boone to be distilled into the final product.
“We do the first step here, they do the final step,” Brooks said. “We’re able to grow it here, process it here and bottle it here. We’re all about keeping the money here in Western North Carolina.”
Abby’s Angels has processed about $1.2 million worth of CBD “crude oil” so far, but they’re nowhere near capacity. They hope to use that extra capacity to process hemp grown by other local farmers.
The farm gives Abby’s Angels plenty of room to expand, and the group has big plans for how to use that capacity.
“As we expand the distribution side, we can help more farmers,” Carrion said. “At full capacity on 40 acres, that’s $56-$58 million, net about $32-35 million.”
Product line
Carrion is planning an extensive product line, with oils in different flavors like lemon and spearmint. A line of lotions is also in the works, along with dog tinctures and bath salts.
“We want to keep as much of this as we can in 828, so we’ve been contacting local businesses from Jackson County to North Georgia,” he said. “We have about 11 stores wanting to carry our brand.
Abby’s Angel Processing will be the distribution arm for the products. Carrion has found a sales representative in the makeup industry and is in the process of looking to add reps for regional distribution.
Jim Ledford is also instrumental at this end of the business. He’s building the display cases that will go into stores.
The products will be headed for store shelves over the next week, he said.
The ambitious plans don’t end with the product line. Plans are to open the farm for agritourism tours next summer.
“They’re going to be talking about this up and down the East Coast,” Carrion said. “It’s going to be big for Franklin.”
Different strains of hemp produce different cannabinoids. One product, cannabigerol or CBG, has shown promise as a treatment for inflammatory conditions such as Crohn’s disease, as well as glaucoma and even cancer, but research is still in the early stages.
Still, CBG figures to be a more lucrative product, and it already figures into the plans for Abby’s Angels. Next year they intend to plant three acres in CBD-producing hemp and two acres in CBG-producing hemp.
The sense of excitement is palpable these days at the Ledford farm.
“At this point, we’re debt-free and sitting on about $1.5 million in inventory,” Carrion said. “That’s not a bad place to be.”