 So we're excited to have Chuck Riffenberg with his business, The Rogue Herbalist, and I love that name. Rudy and Vermont has been doing this week-long collaborative with the Vermont Department of Libraries throughout the state and bringing various programs. It's a grassroots movement. And basically, they're wanting to take the trendy thing out of the whole local food. Basically, let's increase the consumption of local food and keeping the money in our own communities and so forth. And I think we're all a part of that. So this has been sort of the underpinning of this week of Rudy and Vermont. And again, there's been various incentive programs. We had Kathy Dodge who is with Healing Leaves and she spoke of Rudy in your backyard. Just the various roots you can find in your backyard and on the fringes of your backyard. Now, Chuck tonight is going to be talking about CBD and how it is a boon to Vermont's craft herbalism industry. And Chuck has The Rogue Herbalist, which is his own creation of his tinctures and teas. And I know you could probably explain it better than I, but I know Chuck through the sunflower foods. And he's just a wonderful resource. Just you go in with a cough or an itchy throat or whatever. He gives you something and you go, whoa, I'm healed. I mean, I know it's not that simple, but that's how it works for me. So without further ado, I just want to turn it over to Chuck and have him share his experience with all of the herbs that he crafts, wild crafts and what he puts together. And we're so pleased to have you, Chuck. Thank you for coming. Hey, thank you, Judy. You're welcome. Thank you guys for coming out too. This is a nice hour. We don't have it up on the big screen, but I have a little screen for you. Can I work? Yeah, so just to speak on the point of local foods and local medicines is really a key. I spent part of my whole philosophy for a long time is you want to be sourcing as much food and medicine as you can from the eco region that you live in, you know, it's going to be more attuned to your own physiology. You think about people go and get local honey for the fact that the bees are pollinating flowers in their local area. So you're going to be more attuned to what's, you know, the pollen that's in your air. So we do this with everything, really. You think about, you know, whether it's the beef that you get at the grocery or, you know, should be as local as possible, should be as high quality as possible because that's your health. So to speak on CBD and hemp, I've been a fan of cannabis for a long time. It's, you know, like one of the original medicinal plants that we all discover more younger. How has the CBD hemp been a boon to craft herbalism in general? Just speaking about my business, I knew it was the time to finally kind of pull the trigger on this thing. I've been wanting to do this as a business proper for many years, but this was the time to do it because there's so much interest in cannabis in general now and it's really affords us a good opportunity to kind of build bridges with people who might not otherwise know about plant medicine. They come into, you know, I work at the local health food store, the Sunflower Natural Foods. You guys all know me from there. Right up the road here on 100, yeah. Right in Waterbury Center. Okay. Yeah. Just past Ben and Jerry's on the right. Okay, I didn't know it. So, but I'm here while it's there for John and Pam. Yeah, that's how I came to know Judy and that's why I'm here right now. Local herbal medicine is really important to me. So, you can see on the screen here, that's the hemp bitters and the nice background. Just to start off with like the history of hemp, I like to talk about, this is a guy in 1910 in Michigan farming his hemp crops. So this is not a new crop by any means. This is part of American history. You know, the Constitution was written on it. Henry Ford's hemp car, you know, check that out. There's a lot of history to the plant. It goes back further than in the Americas. Obviously it goes back to China. Like I said, one of the original medicinal plants. For seed, for the fiber, you know, for the flowers. It's really kind of funny that, you know, people kind of been asleep for the past hundred years around this issue and due to prohibition and all these things that have gone on. So we're just now kind of coming back to where we ought to be as far as incorporating cannabis and medicinal plants in general into our lives. Most people don't think of plants for medicine. Which is strange to me. But you can see on this picture, this is some patent remedies from the late 1800s and early 1900s. So a lot of people don't know that you could just, a hundred years ago, you could walk into any pharmacy and you could buy a product just like this. It's just a tincture of cannabis. In this case of high CBD hemp grown in Irisburg. I'll talk about my buddy's business in a second. But primarily the difference, probably what they were taking back then was THC tincture as well. But that's what's kind of nice is we can specify our medicines and kind of tune into what you want them to be. This is, yeah, quite a good medicine for reasons that I'm going to hear. I should also say as a caveat, like anything I say is not medical advice. I always like to just put that out there just for any FDA type of thing going on. So some of the different farms that we buy from though, because we don't just make this pure hemp tincture, we make all different formulas using local medicinal plants from Foster Farm and some things as well that are sourced from out of country. But we have a rule that every ingredient we source is of the utmost quality. So everything is either organic, wildcrafted by us or locally sourced, which is also organic. All the Foster Farm herbs there that you're drinking now are organic and really high quality. And it's quite good. So this is just while we're talking about that, it's Anas Pisa, chamomile, lemon balm, oat straw, and Tulsi or holy basil, really nice combo. Yeah, lovely adaptogen. So Crete Valley is my friend Kyle in Irisburg, Vermont. You guys may have seen the kombucha back there. We'll show some pictures of it as well. It's the best kombucha with CBD in it. Each big bottle is 50 milligrams, really good dose. You can break it up into one, two, or three servings and just take a little shot of it at a time. Scrivener Maple provides us both maple syrup and reverse osmosis maple tree water, which is the water that we use in all of our tinctures. So the alcohol we use is organic cane alcohol, really high quality. It's the industry standard. We'll mention that again in the future here. And the water is literally from the trees. So I'll kind of talk about that as well. And then too, just as far as local goes, we're working with all the different local businesses. So Web Sticker and Stowe did this new label design for me and printed them off. They were trying to go local when at all possible. And then of course, all the retailers and stores that carry our products, we're in about 20 stores now across New England. So we're very small compared to a lot of the bigger CBD companies, but that can be a blessing and a curse, I guess, because I think about it. So everything's very small batch, but everything's also of the utmost quality. There's Kyle's kombucha. I definitely encourage you to at least have a taste of it. It's ginger CBD kombucha. It's the same hemp in his kombucha that's in our tincture here and our formulas as well. I went to his land. It's gonna show you some pictures here of the land. So they're actually currently in the midst of renovating this barn. So that's another thing that's important about the whole boom to the economy around hemp is a lot of these Vermont farms are coming back to life. I'm sure you guys have read about a lot of these dairy farms that are going under or growing hemp and able to make a living again. We wanna see that with more than just cannabis too. We wanna see them growing all kinds of medicinal plants. You can check out his Instagram for more pictures of the barn renovation. That's the only one I have. I did a little trip up there a few weeks ago. Let's take some pictures. Just to speak to the quality of his farm, there's organic, like USDA certified organic and then there's proper organic. A lot of people understand that the meaning of organic has been diluted over the years. Regulations allow you to have so many parts per million of this and that. So what he's doing is proper organic. There's no pesticides of any kind. There's the only fertilizer that goes in there is all truly organic. It's pig and sheep manure and compost as well. So one of the key goals that he has for his business is enriching the life of the soil. That's so important to grow healthy plants. And you think about the mess we're in with monocrop agriculture right now is exactly what we wanna avoid with cannabis going forward is just this repetitive cycle of putting in the same three chemicals every year and depleting the soil of all its other micronutrients and proper organisms too. Like there's, people don't know about microbiome. It's why people take probiotics and things for your gut health. It's the same thing across the landscape as well. They have the same as above, so below. It's just throughout the whole landscape. So he's really keen on keeping his land as healthy as possible. Is it gap certified or like gap? I don't know what kind of certifications he has. I just know that it's extremely good quality. Yeah, it's very difficult to make that kind of. Yeah, and there's biodynamic certification and there's all kinds of cool certifications out there. And I'm really a fan of these different voluntary programs where people can go and you bring your stuff up to the level of these different accrediting bodies. So, but yeah, there's no pesticide of any kind. No artificial fertilizers or anything synthetic. No white plastic. You see a lot of farms. I'm not bashing the people with white plastic, but he's proud of the fact he doesn't use any black plastic at all. Everything he does is by hand. It's similar to my operation. It's a small farm, even though they have quite a bit of plants out there. You can see in there, watering some plants in the greenhouse and then bigger crops in the field there. That's just a snapshot of the field. He's got quite a few fields over there. I think they have maybe 10 acres. That might be wrong too, I'm not sure. But we walked quite a ways, I'll say that. Speaking about the health of the ecosystems, well-lit picture of these ladybugs. We're talking about the microbiome of the landscape. There's ladybugs, there's grasshoppers and crickets and all sorts of different plant and animal life that is out there. With these plants, it's not just monocraft cannabis, like one after the other after the other. There's all kinds, red clover and all these different plants growing amongst them. So it's really a diverse ecosystem to work. And you want that because it's healthier for the plants, it's healthier for us. And to the plants adapt to their environment, one of the things Kyle does on his farm is he has a section that's very low-lying and a lot of water gets in there. It's cold and damp in this one part of the farm. So he'll deliberately plant their test crops in there so that they have to deal with the most sort of adversity. And the ones that survive and thrive, they go in and they gather seed from them and perpetuate those good genetics. So he's breeding with a purpose as well as opposed to just breeding for volume, which is kind of the trap we got in with agriculture in the last century. They're just breeding for maximum yield, but you lose a lot of micronutrients. You lose a lot of beneficial chemistry while you're doing that. So I was stoked to see double ladybugs that day. There was tons of them. Just the animal was on his farm there. He's got a ton of these, forget the name of them, they're an heirloom pig from England. And then all kinds of sheep as well. All kinds of plants on his farm there. Nice sunflowers and cherries. There's a lot of fruit out of that property. So it's truly a living ecosystem and not just like a monocrop farm. You see some of these hemp farms, depends on where you're at, but you want to know where your hemp is coming from. You want to know where all of it's coming from ideally, but just speaking about hemp, is your hemp coming from a farm like this where there's all kinds of life, or is it coming from a farm that's smack dab between two GMO corn fields and propane tanks and stuff going on. I saw that today as a matter of fact. So you want quality is the main thing. Speak about foster farm as well, which is what we're drinking right now. I got to go there a couple of years ago and help do some farm work and shuck some garlic and whatnot. It was a good time. But these guys are definitely doing it the right way and growing all the time. So definitely check their products out as well. I think we're gonna start carrying them at the sunflowers. You can check it out there, but they're all over the place as well. These are just some of the plants listed on there that we have in our formulas. Like I said, we're drinking chamomile, and this is a milky oats, and the Tulsi, and lemon balm too. I thought the person said ayahuasca. I'm like what? No, ayahuasca in the mirror, but Ashwagandha, you know, is a lovely adaptogen in the hemp adapt. Just nice pictures which people will be able to see on the presentation when they look at it online as well. So this is Angelica and chamomile growing. That's two of the main herbs in our hemp bitters that we make. So really as many ingredients as we can get that are locally sourced, we try to get them all from these guys. St. John's wort and lemon balm growing there in the hemp herbing that we make. It's a lovely product. Delicious aromatics and everybody knows St. John's wort. Just really awesome farm to check out. And to wildcrafted medicines, as Judy said, I've done some talks here at the library before about wildcrafted medicine, mushrooms and different plants. There's nice photos here of the Rashi harvest last year. Rashi mushroom being one of the key herbs in our hemp adapt formula. So I keep saying adapt, adapt. I don't know if everybody knows this concept of an adaptogen. Basically it's a class of plant that helps you become more resilient to stress. There's whole literature on adaptogens. There's more stimulating ones and more calming ones. The Rashi, it tends to be considered more calming but you find people that occasionally can be kind of excited by it, can be stimulating to some. So there's a chaga mushroom. I'll speak briefly on chaga as well as a medicine because people are concerned about over harvesting of it. I have a rule when I go out, I only really take a piece that I'm able to just break off easily with my hand. And there's a reason for that too is it doesn't reproduce like many of the mushrooms do just like casting spores. So this black piece that's the actual medicinal part is a sterile conch. It's just part that grows out of the tree that we make into this formula here. But if you take the whole thing out then it won't actually reproduce itself. That won't happen until the mushroom has basically consumed the entire tree and the tree has died. And then elsewhere on the tree, what's called a resupinant will grow out and that's what casts the spores. So if you hack into the tree and you take the entire thing, it's not good because it won't be reproducing itself. So we wanna be mindful of wild-crafted resources as well. You can get, like Paul Stamets on the West Coast is doing great work, I guess I haven't seen his stuff. You make medicinal mushroom products and they're actually cultivating the mycelium, the little white rulets of the mushroom itself. And that's quite a sustainable way of doing it as well. But we make this because there are virtues to the fruiting body versus just the mycelium. They're two different things. So we make this in small batch. It's just one of four mushrooms. We actually won an award on this product. It's four mushroom immune complex. Definitely check it out, please. Try to move it along too. There's me with chicken in the woods last year. That's a great edible culinary mushroom but as well as medicinal properties as well. Another good tonic mushroom. A lot of these things that are tonics and adaptogens are bordering on both food and medicine category. You can consume them regularly daily without any kind of problem. What's the definition of a tonic? Just think about the way your muscles will have tone to them, if that makes sense. Yeah, that's kind of the old school definition. It's back from the 1800s, this work came about. But I would say it tonifies you. It makes you stronger. It makes certain organs can be toned by different plants. You think of milk thistle as a popular liver tonic. People take it for the health of their liver and so forth. It's kind of a broad term, but I like it. Tonics are safe and should have them every day. Just speaking on the mushrooms again. You try to dry them in the sun whenever possible. I say wherever possible because it's not always possible. You might be out on a rainy day which is typically when you do find mushrooms. So it's not always possible to sun dry them but the reason you do that is because just like when we're out in the sun and we make vitamin D, so do the mushrooms. Kind of makes them better. Making the product. So just to speak about making the tincture itself. It's really simple, like anybody can do this. And hopefully people will be doing it more now that there's gonna be such a glove hemp on the market. And hopefully the price will be coming down. We're actually trying to make that happen as well. But this is really simply, it's one to three which means for one part hemp, there's three parts organic cane alcohol. So the ratio we use is 834 grams of ground cannabis to 2.5 liters, 2,500 milliliters of alcohol. And that fills the perfect batch jar, one gallon jar. That'll macerate in the alcohol for at least two weeks and then we press it in the hydraulic press there and it makes it very strong, very good cannabis tincture. Do you dry out the tincture? It's dry, yeah. I have some great CBDs that I work at and I've been covered or farmed for four years. Nice. So I know George and Amy saw me make that really great. I wanna make a tincture or something with them and I had no idea like to dry them or something. You definitely wanna dry them when you're making a tincture. I suppose you could, you could make it out of the fresh but you would definitely be wanting to use the pure alcohol 95% or higher because of the water content in the plant. It's dry. You wanna, yeah, we dry it, it's dried and we grind it and then it's tincture. Because too, you'll make a more potent medicine if it's dry, so. But it's not to say that the fresh doesn't have value as well and I'll speak to that as well. So the formula is though, this is, there's no water in this, it's just alcohol and cannabis, just two ingredients, really simple. Anybody can do it. You know, I encourage people to get mine because it's organic cane alcohol and really good cannabis but I do encourage people to make their own products. Why, it's a little more commonly it's being put into oils. Yeah, that's right. I'll speak to that too if you like, so. Let's see what happens just next up. So yeah, so why do we do a true tincture? It's basically the same question because most everybody is doing oil, you see oil and everything and one of the main reasons I want me to do a proper tincture for sale is because people come in looking for tincture for sale and they say, you have any CBE tincture and all these companies are selling their oil as tincture. So I say, well, you always go through the talk like, well, it's not actually tincture, but it's oil, so this is a true tincture. There's different ways that these oils are being made. Most of the oil in the market seems is CO2, super critical CO2 extraction, which is basically high pressure CO2 becomes liquefied and then it's run through all the plant material and that yields really efficient extraction. The other way is to make a tincture and ethanol preparation and then it goes into a device that's called a rotary evaporator. Basically, it's basically just cooking it at a low temperature, but with the rotary evaporator, it keeps a constant temperature and you're able to draw a vacuum on it so you can boil it at a lower temperature. It's essentially a piece of laboratory equipment that you can acquire and do that with. I wanted to do it at home. Yeah, you could build such a thing. I've been wanting to build my own or you can just buy them on the internet too. Can you just more simply do it without that? You could, yeah. But here's the thing that I'll speak to is the reason why we don't do that is I don't know if you can see the chart very well. I show this chart to people all the time, but so it's the range of cannabinoids that you're extracting through these different modes and they talk about decarboxylation. Yeah, you know what that is, it's the heating of it. So when you heat it up, there's different cannabinoids here. This is CVDA, which in the living plant, it's all CVDA, it's in the acid form. It's, you know, there's no CVD until it's heated. So this is basically a more kind of natural collection of cannabinoids. You know, there's both the CVDA and CVD. They both have redeeming values and medicinal qualities to them. Let's see, I've got it here for you. This talks about all the use of the A. So just to speak to the A, and so CVD itself is crossing your blood-brain barrier. That kind of gives you, you know, this sedative anxiolytic calming effect that people are looking for. And a lot of people do report back that they kind of feel like they get high from CVD. I think if you take a high enough dose, you'll definitely feel what they're talking about. And it's not a THC high, but it's its own kind of experience. That's one of the myths that surrounds CVD is that it's not psychoactive constituent. It actually is, just not in the same way that THC is. And that's not a problem either. Let's see. So, but CVDA is not able to cross the blood-brain barrier. So it stays systemic for the body and has an anti-inflammatory effect in that way. This next one should say, yeah. So there's research that you can go find that talks about it as a COX-2 inhibitor. That's the way a lot of our anti-inflammatory drugs work. I think when people come in looking for the kind of aches and pains of relief that they want of CVD, I think a CVDA product is a better choice or something that's more balanced. There are companies that make products with both. They're just CVDA. There's all kinds of stuff on the market that's available. But if you're looking for joint pain, CVDA is what you would want. And my friend here brought up the raw plant itself. I think what we'll probably start to see in the future is a lot more juicing of the cannabis plant as well. There's such a huge amount of fresh plant material. I really think that these guys would be selling their fresh plants to these juicers and places to make fresh cannabis juice out of. Or just incorporating it into other juices as well. Because it would be a great idea. Yeah. Well, and the kombucha is with CVD, not CVDA, but you could still do that. You can really make whatever you want for products. So is there a way from the normal plant to get the CVDA? Either you consume it raw or you would consume it in a tincture like this where there's no heat. Yeah. You could just eat. The heat gets rid of the A. Yeah, correct. Which is still okay. Is that the C-curve ox? Yeah, that's exactly what that is. So most people want to get rid of the A. Well, yeah, I mean, some of them do. Why? Because the CVD itself gives you that more calming and anxiolytic effect. And it helps with sleep. And the A is the anti-inflammatory. Yeah, and A is really more. And think about it like this, too, is the molecules are very similarly structured. All the cannabinoids are similarly structured. So they're doing similar things in the body. If you read like, I don't like thinking of it in terms of what does this one do precisely? What does this one do? They all kind of do similar things. Yeah. But that's why I am a proponent of more whole-plan medicine, yeah. Truly, yeah, closer to nature, I would say. So this talks about it as an anti-inflammatory and also good research as an anti-emetic. People that are dealing with chemotherapy or just nausea in general. There's a lot of gastrointestinal stuff out there now for numerous reasons. So here's another one on CVDA talking about it being studied in breast cancer. We can't make any claims about that, but people do have that question. I point them to the research. Like, it's not as if this research doesn't exist. It still astounds me that people will comment on urgent supplements, vitamins, and things, and they say, oh, there's no research and that's not regulated. Like, that's not true at all. Like, it's very well-researched and there's actually quite a bit of regulation around them. We try to point people to the research. This piece here talks about the synergy of all the constituents. So this is what would be considered a crude extract. Like, you've just made it very simply an alcohol. It's a crude extract. And people will try to act as if these highly refined oils are a superior product to crude extract. When in fact, herbal medicine shows us otherwise, you know. There's plenty of examples of other plants where they'll remove a constituent and they're just testing, you know, one standardized constituent and it will not work as well as if the whole plant were administered because these, all these different chemicals in the plants are working together. Like, they have a purpose to be there and there's a synergy that takes place amongst them. And I'm just, before we talk about the RO water, just on that note, it's not too, I don't want to trash synthetics or standardized products either. And I do believe they all have value and I do believe they're all therapeutic or they have their own specific application. But if you were to put it under my head, I would say that I think a crude extract closer to nature is a superior medicine. You know, just my personal point of view of philosophy, but I think that we have to do it as a show that as well. And two, because it, you know, people can do this themselves and it connects you to your community. You're able to go to your local herbalist and farmer and see the plants and, you know, have a connection with them. As opposed to if you're buying product from the other side of the country or the world for that matter, you have no connection there. And there's all different factors that go into that. You can't account for the quality of the product and, you know, the energy that it took to ship it to here and all these types of things. So. And that's a point in local. Exactly. The point of the whole thing, right? Absolutely. So, this other piece is really cool. We use in all of our tinctured formulas. So this is the only one with no water in it. Everything else has some water in it as well as alcohol. We use reverse osmosis maple tree water. So it's, they take in the maple sap and, let's see if I have a picture. Yeah, they've taken sap, put it in the RO. Basically the reason they do that is because it cuts down on boiling time and you can save the amount of wood you have to boil. But then you have all this extra maple tree water which forever people were just, you know, washing their floors with it. They didn't use it for anything. Just now we're starting to see these companies come out with beverages, sparkling maple water and, you know, different creations with the maple tree water. And Tommy, my business partner, who's not able to make it tonight, but this is from his family's maple operation in Duxbury. So he came up with the idea. He's like, we should use the maple tree water for the decoction process, which is like, you saw the mushrooms earlier. You do what's called a decoction, basically where you simmer, cook them in the water and that's breaking down all the, the chitin, the cells that basically hold in the medicine. You wanna break that down by cooking it in the water. And they're water soluble sugar molecules that get released into the water. So we do that and then that gets combined with the other herbs and the cannabis all into one product. But if you think about this idea of local, like this is literally the rain fell into the earth and when these trees took it up, turns it into the sap and comes out and we take the water again. I really, it's sort of an alchemical thing if you know anything about that. It's like taking the pieces of nature apart and then putting it back together in this new form. The water from the tree and these mushrooms grow in the forest and on the trees and hopefully next to the forest is a nice cannabis farm and other medicinal plant farm. So it's bringing it all back to one medicine. And two, just thinking about the future. I just saw in the news of the day there's gonna be a lavender farm in the Northeast Kingdom. That's awesome. I went to one in Quebec last year and it was outstanding. So there's local saffron being grown now. I don't know if you guys know that but there's a saffron farm in Stouff, I believe. We want as much of this as possible and we want to encourage people to buy these products even if they are expensive at first. The quality is higher and keep some money local, keep your money right in the local economy. The same people like them? Yeah, and then, okay, so check this out. I saw at the farmer's market, there's the Caledonia spirits, I think, is making this maple vodka and I bought a bottle of it for my buddy's wedding as a gift and I sampled it while I was there and it's outstanding. So one of my actually, hopefully not too long term goals, hopefully in the next few years we're gonna do this, I want to start making my own alcohol from maple syrup and then you tincture your herbs in the actual maple alcohol and then every single ingredient is right from here as close as you can get to this because right now the only ingredient that we source that's at least for these formulas, this series of formulas is right from Vermont, the only thing that's not is the alcohol which comes from the West Coast because we're buying bulk cane sugared alcohol, organic, it's kind of difficult but you can't get any more organic than the maple trees. It's almost like a wild-crafted alcohol. Like we use the wild-crafted water there. And I do, I want to have my own apocrypterian herb school as well so that's when you support local, like you're supporting projects like this that matter to the community as well, instead of sending money to Colorado, California or whoever, not to say you can't do that because there aren't tons of good products from all these places, but speaks to the importance of local. I wanted to go out on this note and kind of talk about the past and the future. This is an article about this company, Libreta Incorporated, receiving a patent for a CVDA. Manufactured from East though, so it's a synthetic cannabinoid even if it's made in a natural process but it's non-hemp CVDA. This company as well, Source Naturals makes a CVD that's not from hemp at all. It's manufactured in a laboratory from Orange Peel and some sort of pine tree but it's not real CVD in my opinion because it's not, it's molecularly the same but it's not from the plant itself. It's been crafted. So it's not- The synergy is lost. Correct, exactly. And we don't want to lose the synergy. The synergy is the most important thing but just to speak to the past and the future if you read any of the history on how Big Pharma came in and took over the industry of medicine pushed out herbalist and chiropractors and anybody who practiced any other form of medicine then allopathic. That's been 100 years we've been at this and it's a losing strategy. So going forward in the new millennia here we need to think about where we're gonna head. We can either kind of do what our ancestors did or we can continue on with the same failed strategy which they say is the definition of insanity. So yeah, but I have my hopes for the future. I keep spreading this message of synergistic and holistic plant medicine. Yeah, that's it. Chuck, it's been great. I've been a love pipe president and I just want to give a shout out to Chuck East. Like I said in the beginning many times I'll go in and say, hey Chuck, who was the latest in congestion and you turn me on to Elec and Penn. Elec and Penn? Elec and Penn. And I'm like, oh, miracle. It's like all of a sudden it just, you know. And I know you sell the digestive bitters and I've done that and I get stomach upset and it's like to me it's like a miracle because it's like I just took a dropper of something and you know and again it's the real source is what you're saying. It's unadulterated and the power is in the medicine. Yeah and it works better than if you were to just take one of those chemicals out of that plant. It might be helpful if you did that but it's going to work better if you've got the whole range of chemistry in there. People, you know, they act like you have to go through this whole refining process and like oh, primarily I guess the main reason is that they want to make a product that's going to taste nice. They don't want, and you guys can sample this if you haven't already tasted it. But it tastes like cannabis. It's like that's the only flavor you taste. But you want to taste that. You want to taste all the chemistry in the plant. You want to taste the bitter and the pungent flavors and that is a sign of pungency and high quality medicine. If you take an oil and it has no taste to it, how effective is it really going to be? It might be, it might even test in the thing that it's very high in CBD or whatever molecule you're after but without that accompanying chemistry, you know it's not doing what it needs to be doing in the human body. Was there a difference between white rice and having a brown whole grain rice? Sure. You can have the white processed piece of crap rice while you're going to eat the real deal. Yeah, that's where all the nutrients are. That's a great analogy. You know how I like to liken it to is if you look back at the cannabinoid profile, like CBD is just one note on a keyboard. It's just one note as opposed to the whole plant which is like a whole symphony at work. It's all the different chemistry being played. And in the manner that nature put it there too, it's really something. Please. What about eating a few leaves in a salad? It's a great idea. What's the, is it better or is some process being left out that is necessary? I mean, you're not going to get as potent of a dose of medicine if you took something like that that has been concentrated. If you're just eating it, but it's good to eat a few leaves every day. It is kind of resonance, like you said, but. Maybe you could make a salad dressing with a boil. Yeah, right. That's a great idea. That's better than just eating it. I saw a meme that was so good and I tried to find it for this, but it's basically, it's talking about how back when we saw the old guy there growing hemp in 1910, people were feeding their pigs and animals, the leftover hemp. And then the animals are benefiting from that as well. They've got their mammals like we are. They have the endocannabinoid system as well. So, and then that translates into the meat and milk that people were eating as well. So there was, you know, cannabinoids in the food chain, but that's been removed in the past hundred years. So that's, I think, a great point about how people are walking around in such a state of inflammation. So Chuck, to speak to the endocannabinoids that are in our system, if you would. So they talk about endocannabinoid system. It's basically, it's a regulating system in the human body. Actually, there's cannabinoids in breast milk. There's different phyto cannabinoids, plant-based cannabinoids, in plants other than cannabis too. At Knacia and Crickly Ash, these different ones. People are making formulas now that are other plants than cannabis because everyone's still got this taboo around cannabis or they don't want THC or what have you. So they make a formula that's kind of acting on the same receptors, but it's not CBD. It's like that source naturals one, in a way. But it's still, at least they're using whole plants for that. But basically, how does it work? Like the simple explanation that I like best is there's, all your neurons are firing constantly. There's chemical, electrical energy being exchanged. When you're constantly in a state of inflammation, your body is just pumping out pro-inflammatory chemicals, cytokines, and all these different things, prostaglandins, what the cannabis is doing, how it's having its anti-inflammatory effect is, it's regulating this system of communication and it's basically sending feedback messages saying, we've received the message, you can stop making so much pro-inflammatory chemistry. Like, we got it, we're good. That's a simple explanation that was told to me that I like it. That's great. Yeah, thank you. But it goes deeper than that, obviously. And that's too, talking about this synergistic chemistry, that's too why we make herbal formulas. We made four different ones there that have hemp and other herbs in them, because people come in looking for CBD for a lot of different reasons, and they don't know why, they just know that it works because everyone is talking about it. So we made the purest so people can understand what it is on its own. But we also made the formulas that are a little more honed in on specific reasons that somebody would want a CBD product for, whether it be stress or nerve pain or sleep or digestive issues, the whole range is there. So, yeah, it's a treat. Must be a good look out. What is good for a good look out? Is it good for a good look out? It probably helps with the pain of the out, definitely. Was that? Nothing's good for a good look out. Well, changing the diet is... I gave cherry juice. Cherry juice. I gave it a tap very rarely, but they say... And actually, it totally is. That's like our favorite thing to tell people to put this in is the tart cherry concentrate. It's really good. It is good, yeah, it tastes great and it's very anti-inflammatory. Tart cherry is helpful with sleep as well. It's got naturally-occurring melatonin in it. And it's super simple, and it's delicious. Yeah. What do you guys think of the treats over there? Yum. It's delicious as well. Hey, one. Hey, one, yeah? Right, was it delicious? Feel free to... We'll take some pics of the stuff and... Yeah. Any more questions or yeah? Yeah, I told you I was working at a CBD company and one of the things that I was learning about their products was about feminized seeds. Right. If I can get this before we open them? No, it's fine. Just go back and do it. Can we just put your toggle chain in the picture? It's fine. I can do it. Yeah, go ahead. Go on. Can you talk about the differences between how people cultivate them plants? Yeah. Optimal production, you know. Yeah, and how do they make feminized seeds? I'm not actually really keen on the breeding of cannabis. That's a better question for my buddy Kyle. But, yeah. That's how we didn't believe in feminized seeds. I agree with that. It stands too. Just, yeah. You shouldn't be putting in hormones in there or anything to influence it one way or the other. But it's a factor I think they would make crafted. In production. You know, if the people could consider when they're looking at plants, at products. But I'm not sure you can always find out. No, right. That's a really great point. That's one thing nobody's really talked about either. So I know that, like I said, one of the things that Kyle does there in his farm is they just basically breed for strength and quality. Like they put those test crops in like the mud, not the mud, but the wet part of the farm. And then, you know, that which thrives in the, you know, the harsh Vermont climate is the one that they use. And then do they pull out male plants? Or, because they don't want to, you know, fertilize their females either. Because you want, and that's another myth. It doesn't be standard then in all production. I think so. This is curious about how it all works, right? Yeah. But a lot of people are confused and they think like male female plants, they think that, oh, CBD comes from the male plant and THC comes from the female plant. Like none of that is true at all. It's the strains of the plant that you're dealing with. So. Like just, can you cannabis a tea that versus CBD is something else? It's all cannabis, you know? Right. And there's different, so yeah, this is a good point for people to talk about is. So some of, like these bigger companies will sell CBD oil from Europe and we don't have. Like it's supposed to be a good thing. But actually I don't believe it's good for a number of reasons. One of the main ones is they're growing the industrial hemp for fibers and whatnot. And they're putting it into these, you know, huge machines. So you're, people don't know, cannabis is a key later. Like it pulls minerals and metals out of the soil. So if there's contamination in the soil, it's also pulling that in there. So that's why people are concerned about where they're going. Yeah. And the testing of plant material the remedy for that is to buy small and buy local and know your farmer, know your herbalist. Because if you're buying this stuff on the other side of the world, you never know what you're gonna get.