Evo Hemp partners with Pine Ridge farmers

BOULDER — Evo Hemp, the Boulder-based company known for its line of hemp bars that are sold in more than 3,000 retailers, including Whole Foods Markets, Kroger, Wegmans and Earth Fare, has a new line of CBD extracts and soft gel capsules made with organic hemp grown by Native American hemp activist Alex White Plume on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation of South Dakota. The HempX Extract and HempX Capsules are available in retailers and online.

Evo Hemp’s mission is to use industrial hemp to empower small U.S.

farmers and revitalize poor farming communities, according to information supplied by the company. Partnering with the Pine Ridge Reservation, where 90 percent of Lakota residents live below the federal poverty level, is part of that effort.

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Alex White Plume has been battling the U.S. government for years to be able to grow hemp on his land. From 2000 to 2002, he garnered unwanted publicity when United States federal drug agents raided his farm and destroyed his crop of industrial hemp.

“There’s no one we would rather help reach sustainability than the Native American tribes,” said Jourdan Samel, CEO of Evo Hemp. “This is especially true of the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, which is considered the poorest community in the United States.”

Evo Hemp currently has 10-acres of organic hemp crop under contract with the tribe and hopes to expand the partnership moving forward. The White Plume Hemp line will make up 25 percent of Evo Hemp’s revenue in 2018, the company said. According to Shawn Hauser, an attorney with the American Hemp Campaign, the per-acre value of hemp production is around $21,000 from seeds and $12,500 from stalks.

“We started Evo Hemp because we knew that creating a domestic hemp supply would yield jobs and create wealth for poor rural communities,” said Evo Hemp President Ari Sherman. “This mission brought us to the Pine Ridge Reservation, the poorest place in the United States, with the hope of bringing economic prosperity.”