 This is Stink Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. I'm Maisha Joyner, and this is Cannabis Chronicles, a 1,000 year odyssey. So tell me, Muse, of the plant of many resources, which wonder far and wide the ancient plant of food, fuel, and fiber cultivated for the millennia. As we venture through the past 10,000 years, we will explore and discover the plant from which cannabis derives. The many uses of the plant, hemp, cannabis hashes, cannabis and religion, cannabis and medicine, cannabis and dear old Uncle Sam. And so our odyssey begins today. Not long ago and far away, it begins today on the Big Island. And for any of you that don't know, the Big Island is the island of Hawaii, and it's called the Big Island because it really is big. I mean, you know, you could gather up all the other islands and sit them down on the Big Island and there'd be room to spare. And so we are talking today with Steve Salat. I hope I got that pronounced right. And Steve is the co-founder and CEO of Manana Artisan Botanicals, as well as owner of Ho'o Na'ao Farm. And he is also one of the co-founders, I think that's right, of the farm that got the contract from the state of Hawaii from the Department of Agriculture to develop hemp seeds so that the seed is now endemic to Hawaii. So hopefully I got some of that right. And good morning, Steve. Thank you so much. Good morning, Marcia. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Let me just, can I help out a little bit? Please do. So my last name is Sacala. Sacala. Yeah, and the hemp CBD business that I have is Manana Artisan Botanic. And the farm where I have a little guest retreat and invite people to come and do educational opportunities is called Ho'o Na'ao Na'ao Farm. So, you know, lots of vows in there, but we certainly enjoy the diversity of all the places that we get to be. So you live there at the farm where you have the retreat? Correct. Ho'o Na'ao Na'ao Farm is my home as well as our retreat center. Correct. So now you look like a very young man. Where do you find time for all of these ventures? Well, that's a really good question. I'm still trying to figure out the life play balance right now. My focus has been mostly on developing the farm and the hemp strains as well as the CBD business. Luckily, I really enjoy what I do. And so I don't feel the need to do many other things because there's not really time to do them. So I love farming. I love working with cannabis. I've been in the cannabis industry over 20 years. And it's my passion, along with sustainable farming. So I get to do what I love. Well, now how did you get started in farming? You know, I had both of my grandfathers, both on my mom's side and my dad's side, both came directly from farming families. And so it was in my lineage. It was in my genetics. I was exposed to those family roots early on. And somehow, even though I grew up in the suburbs, I caught the bug. And so I studied natural resources in college with a little bit of agriculture woven into that and sustainable systems. And really it was my broad interest and sustainability that took me to West Africa for four years with the Peace Corps. And in my time living in West Africa in a mud hut with a grass roof and a subsistence culture in a very small village, I had the realization that agriculture is the foundation of all culture. And until we can really put our agriculture systems here in the West on a sustainable track and a sustainable path, almost all my other interests are secondary. And so I dedicated my passion and my life to creating sustainable agriculture systems. So is that what you mean by a purpose driven business? Yes, that's exactly what I mean. And it's broader than that. You're referring to the mission statement with mana artists and botanics. Not only are we wanting to promote a sustainable cannabis industry, we also wanted to create really high end products that people could get a sense of what Hawaii has to offer from our agriculture. In addition to that, we wanted to create products that brought wellness and communicated a story of Hawaii and the wellness that the Hawaiian islands are known for. So there's so many different aspects of what that purpose is, but the sustainable agriculture is certainly a big piece of that. Well, so that is how it all started. That's where you began this venture. So how did you discover or reach with the CBD? Let's start with CBD. Sure. Well, so I was already a medical grower here in Hawaii. I had been for many years and a medical grower means a cannabis, a medical grower. Yes, a medical cannabis grower. Correct. Yeah, just a little bit of history. I actually worked on the first medical marijuana initiative and hemp initiative in California in 1992 with Jack Herrera. And he really, you know, the emperor wears no clothes is where I really got my awareness of what hemp and cannabis has the potential to do for our planet and for our human species. And so my journey on cannabis started very young at 17. Of course, I worked on the it didn't pass in 1992, but it passed in 1996. So I pretty much became a medical grower as soon as we were able to legally after that path back forward to Hawaii. I'm growing medical cannabis and working my very diverse permaculture farm and a friend comes to me who is working with a woman who has cancer and says, have you heard of CBD? And this is about eight or nine years ago. And having been in cannabis so long, I was surprised and a bit skeptical. I said, no, but let me check it out. Well, that was the beginning of the journey. I dove into the research around CBD. Of course, it was discovered by Rafael Machulovic in Israel. And the research was not numerous, but certainly we knew that CBD had the majority of the health benefits of cannabis related to CBD, not THC. And so I began to grow a CBD rich strain and share it with friends and family. And it immediately was clear to me that this was the wave of the future, that the way people were impacting, being impacted in their health and their well-being and their mental states. I just became really laser focused on what CBD could offer as a health benefit to the body. Now, I've heard pro and con, not about the benefits, but whether it's legal. Now, some people say it's legal in all 50 states and other people say it's not. So where are we in that venture? I know you sell it and I've seen it sold online. So is it legal or not? And I guess if it wasn't, you couldn't sell it online. That's right. What we would call this is kind of a little bit of a gray area. But for all intents and purposes, yes, it is legal. And the reason that it's legal is because in 2014, the Obama administration helped usher through the 2014 Farm Bill. And in that Farm Bill, there was a hemp directive and a provision that allowed for states to enact hemp programs for research and education. As a part of that hemp provision, there was the ability to study the commerce of hemp that was grown in these legal states. So it was the 2014 Farm Bill that is allowing for the hemp to be sold and grown legally under state law. So that's what gives us the ability to sell CBD legally. So you can grow the plant and extract the CBD. Is that correct? Yes. If you are in a state that has a hemp program. So in Hawaii, we are still in the early stages of our hemp development program. So we're growing hemp under a state contract. They paid us to do some research in a climatization study. There are now a few people that also have hemp permits outside of the contracts. Unfortunately, there has yet to be a CBD variety approved by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture. And so there are no CBD hemp strains growing in Hawaii yet that can be extracted. We're hoping that we have a CBD hemp strain that's approved by the Board of Agriculture in the next few months so that by next season that will be the case. So the CBD comes from the cannabis plant. Is that correct? All of these come from the same plant. Tell me, what's the difference in a cannabis plant and a hemp plant? Yeah, that's a really good question. There's a lot of misinformation that gets riled around that question. From the botanical point of view, from the scientific point of view, hemp is in the cannabis family. It is the exact same genetic plant. The difference comes when you take into the man-made construct of what we define as hemp and that is traditionally it's been a fiber crop. So the hemp plants grew very tall and lanky and those were harvested for fiber or seed for food or hemp oil as in the seed oil for the omegas and things you put in your salad dressing. Since the 2014 Farm Bill, we have bred down some of the high THC cannabis plants that become hemp plants that have high CBD. Most hemp plants that you grow for fiber or seed do not have high levels of CBD. They have small levels and you can get an industrial hemp and extract it and get a little bit of CBD, but it's not very high quality CBD. It's not what I would consider to be a medicinal grade CBD. Now that we've bred new hemp strains, which are by definition in America at least, 0.03% THC. It's a man-made designation. Anything with a 0.3% less THC is considered hemp. Now we've developed these high CBD strains that qualify as hemp. And so the strains we use in like mona artist botanics products and that many of the people are using for these high CBD products are really a high grade hemp plant that's grown just like medicinal cannabis. Females only, high resin content, really nice terpene profiles, and that's what we're putting into our mona products as many of the other companies are doing as well. OK, now you just said something that, how do you tell a male from a female plant? I mean, I understand that the plants understand, but how do you understand? Yeah, so it's a really clear indication. Female plants have pistols or hairs, just like a lot of other female flowers and a lot of other plant kingdom families. And the males have pollen sacs. So as you begin to grow a plant, there's ways to sex them early and find out if they're a female or a male because you don't necessarily want to grow out a big male plant when you're really focused on females. So the male plants have little pollen sacs and the females develop pistols and then that's how you can tell the difference. And so that as they grow, you separate them so that they don't cross-pollinate? Yeah, in our case, when we're doing CBD hemp, unless we want to pollinate for seed for next year's crop, all the males get weeded out or taken down or cut down and used for compost or biomass for other reasons. And only the female plants are used for the high quality CBD. Oh, boo. Anyway. Just like in medical cannabis, you don't want male plants around because they create seeds and seeds take away from the high potency of the resin content of a female plant. So it's the same for growing a high concentration of CBD. You want as much of that resin content to put into a medicinal product as you can, but if they're pollinated with a bunch of seed, it's much more difficult to get that really high-grade product. So once you cut down the male plant, can you use it for something else? I mean, you don't just throw it away. You could. I don't. I use it for compost. But in a commercial operation, let's say on the mainland somewhere like in Colorado, those male plants could potentially go to a biomass project or a fiber project. But it's unlikely that that happens because really the fiber plants grow much differently than we're growing our CBD plants. So potentially you could turn it into a hempcrete. That would be a really great use of a male plant when it's cut down. We've had several people told me to be sure to ask you about hempcrete. So we need to take a break and we'll come back in 60 seconds and then tell us about hempcrete. Okay? Be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. My name is Stephanie Mock and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmers series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pomei Weigert and we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on a Thursdays at 4 p.m. and we hope we'll see you next time. Aloha. And we're back. And Steve is going to tell us all about the hemp plant. And I was asking Steve about hempcrete or hempcrete, where you use it as a building product. Tell us about that, how we go from the plant to hempcrete and then to a building product. Yes, so hempcrete is actually a fairly simple process. I think there's a lot of potential for hempcrete as a building material and a sustainable material. You know, it hasn't been tried and true here in Hawaii. So there's still some question marks about the long-term viability of the material here in Hawaii with our high humidity and our high moisture levels. But I do know that they built a demonstration home over in Maui with hempcrete. So, you know, I would say over the next three to five years we'll have a pretty good idea of how that's holding up for our tropical environment. But in general, hempcrete is basically just the pit, the fiber part, the woody inside of the hemp plant mixed with lye. And that creates a very stable building material, very low cost. If it turns out to be something that holds up well the humidity and moisture, it's going to be a really great economically viable way to do sustainable building here in Hawaii. So we're really excited about that potential with hempcrete. Now, where is this house that was built in on Maui? That's a really good question. I haven't got to see it in person, but if you look up hempcrete house Maui online, that should give you some pictures. I know they've done some tours of it. So I don't know exactly where it's located though off the top of my head. Okay, let's go back to the hemp development. You got the contract from the Department of Agriculture, State Department of Agriculture to create a seed that's endemic to Hawaii. Tell us about that. Well, so just to clarify, endemic means native to Hawaii. So we're not trying to create an endemic seed. We're trying to create an acclimatized seed. Acclimatized, okay. So we're trying to create, yeah, trying to create seeds that are acclimatized to the Hawaiian climate as well as our daylinks. The challenge in that, Marcia, is that typically cannabis does much better and is more typically growing at northern latitudes. So being that we're closer to the equator, our daylinks don't change as dramatically. And there's not as clear as signals to the cannabis plant of when to be in vegetative growth and when to be in flowering. So we have been experimenting with the seeds that the state provided us, which were from China. It was a fiber and seed variety for food. And that seems to do very well here, the Yuma variety. That's the seed that's approved for those that receive a hemp perm to grow at the moment. It's the only seed that's approved. The other varieties we're testing are either varieties that we brought in from other locations, or we had been developing under our medical licenses. And so far, it's been a little bit more challenging than we had hoped to get a CBD variety that would adapt. But we're still diligently working on developing those so that we have something in the very near future for farmers to be able to plant in the field without light and grow CBD here in Hawaii. So far, what we have found is that the CBD varieties want longer days so that they stay in vegetative growth before they go to flower, which for us means additional lighting. And on a large scale, we don't feel like that's sustainable. So we're really trying to develop a variety that can grow without additional lighting. And so instead of three crops a year, they would like two crops a year, the plant itself or wine. Yeah, one would be the, like in Colorado or California or anywhere on the mainland, they get one crop a year in the field. We're hoping to get maybe two or three, especially with the fiber and the seed variety. With the CBD variety, it will be difficult to pull off two or three crops unless there's additional lighting. So if you did it indoor, yeah, if you had a closed nursery with artificial lighting. A closed nursery or a greenhouse type of environment where you could hang lights and do, you know, it's not a lot of lighting, but it is going to require infrastructure. They usually require about three to four additional hours of light on top of our normal daylight here in Hawaii so that they stay in vegetative growth and get to the side that makes it commercially viable to extract from. So a solar wouldn't do because that's still the same amount of sunlight. Well, if you were really in a sunny spot and you had a solar system and could store that energy in a nice battery bank. I mean, the battery technology is certainly getting better and better all the time. That would be one way to do it more sustainably is to run a big solar system and battery bank to run those lights. So now you have how many people have a license? Well, so I mean for the seed to develop like you do from in terms of right there was three of us three so on different islands three teams. Yeah, exactly the UH they're on a Wahoo got one of the contracts. Another gentleman and his team on Maui got one of the contracts and then my partner and I got one of the contracts here for the big island. Okay, so that would mean the different soil and the different climate, of course. Yes, correct. Now, as my understanding is UH did not test any CBD varieties. They were only testing the Yuma variety. So they weren't doing any development of seeds. They were only testing the seed that the state asked them to grow, which wasn't ideal because it would have been really great to have in a Wahoo team that did some stuff outside of just the one seed. That's the way that they did their experiment. The gentleman and his team and Maui did some experiments with multiple varieties in a Wahoo Maui and and so they did get some seed out of that. I don't know how the CBD variety did. Unfortunately, I don't think it did very well. You know, we had the volcano here that definitely threw off our season as well. So it wasn't necessarily the best test of what was possible. But yeah, essentially the three teams have been testing the seeds in different environments. Okay, so now you are again, since it is the big island, you're not close to where the volcano erupted. No, we are on the other side of the island. So my farm is in South Kona. And then the farm where we're doing the hemp acclimatization and research studies is near the southern part of the island. Oh, okay, so you didn't get any of the storm damage and the volcano damage? No, gratefully we escaped any storm damage and the volcano certainly created a really challenging air quality situation for us. But we weren't in any immediate danger of lava. Yeah, but the air quality was just horrible for everybody. I mean, you know... It was, it was, it was unprecedentedly terrible. I mean, it really was a major challenge to kind of deal with that. Unfortunately, I didn't have any cannabis in flower and nothing on my farm here in South Kona seemed to suffer too much. But I, you know, of course, we know a lot of friends over on the Helo side in Kona that really took big losses either losing their farms or with the air quality. Oh, yes. The papaya, the orchids. Yeah, really tough on that. Yeah, especially with the papaya who loves that climate. Now they've got to figure out how to grow papaya someplace else. Right. And so now, but getting to your experimental farm, there's no problem getting through the Puna District. I'm, you know, traveling. Well, you know, I don't, I don't have to drive through the Puna District to get from my place to South Point, luckily. So it's only about a 45 minute drive, but straight down the west side here. Oh, okay. Never had a problem getting to the farm, which has been good. Very good. So other than the atmosphere, no, no other damage. Yeah, thankfully, no other damage. Okay. Real quick. Let's go back up to Kona and tell us about your retreat. Yeah. So I've been developing Hona now farm for about the last 11 years. When I bought the farm, it was a macadamia nut farm. And so I slowly began taking the macadamia nut trees down and diversifying with fruit trees and gardens and a lot of medicinal plants as well as spice trees. So now I have a little model here that is a demonstration of what I would like to see more of here in Hawaii, which is a diversified agriculture model. And so I have milking goats and milking sheep. I have chickens and ducks, lots of turmeric and mimaki and other medicinal plants in addition to the cannabis. And then of course we invite people to come and do education programs with us and stay with us in our short term vacation rentals and enjoy the farm atmosphere and kind of get a more true experience of what Hawaii has to offer beyond the tourist scene. Dr. Doolittle, huh? Well, you know, you know, you wear many hats to make it in Hawaii. And so this one has been a really great experiment with small scale agriculture. I am, I'm delighted that you're doing this and I do want to come visit. How do you move that out to the rest of Hawaii? Because we're, we need this on each island. We need the diversified agriculture. We need the retreat. All of those things. How do we move it from where you are to the rest of the rest of the state? Yeah, you know, I would say there's models on each of the island that already exists. The problem is just really making it known where, where those models are so that people can visit them and be inspired by them. I hope, you know, how do we inspire people to live a more sustainable existence here on these islands? But my work with the Hawaii Farmers Union United is a really great way to connect with what's going on statewide. So I encourage folks to get involved, even if you're not a farmer, if you appreciate the food that's grown here in Hawaii, get involved with Hawaii Farmers Union United. We're doing really great things to affect policy at our legislative level as well as putting on really great local events. We're about to have our annual convention over in Maui in October, the end of October with some really great speakers. So there's a really great way to be educated about diversified agriculture and sustainable agriculture is through those types of programs. And then, you know, it really is about getting the word out so people that can support the farmers that are doing this type of agriculture. We need people to buy products that understand the value of what goes into making a sustainable value added product from diversified agriculture. It's not the same model as monoculture where you can just drive your tractor, harvest it and process it for a very low cost. It's a much higher cost. We have to make a living and pay our mortgages and our utilities and make an existence here. So, you know, hoping to get people to realize the true value of food and paying a little extra for locally grown food makes a big difference for us farmers. Well, this has been a real pleasure spending this time with you. Will you come back during your conference and talk to us again about the Maui conference? Yeah, I would be delighted. I really appreciate you having me on today. I always love talking about cannabis and hemp and what we can really do with those potentials here in Hawaii. So thanks for having me on. Thank you so much. Aloha. And we'll see you next time.