Courtesy of Stone Lake Hemp
Matt and Mary Suminski
Milwaukee home remodeler Matt Suminski grew up in Northern Wisconsin and enjoyed gardening as a child. He eventually missed open spaces and having land, so toward the end of 2017, he bought a farm in Lake Mills. While researching what types of crops to grow, Wisconsin’s industrial hemp pilot program was signed into law.
“I was reading about hemp and all the benefits, and my sisters and my mom were taking cannabidiol (CBD) oil and it really helped them,” he says. One of his sisters, Mary Suminski, had found CBD relieved her arthritis, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. She eventually joined Matt on his new venture to form Stone Lake Hemp (formerly Stone Lake Organics), a seed-to-bottle CBD business that offers single-strain CBD tinctures. They handle all of the growing, processing and bottling themselves.
They started planting hemp in 2018. Matt received clones of the cherry strain that he received from an acquaintance. “It was very hard to get seeds and clones at that time. That was one of the biggest challenges,” he says. They note that in April of 2018, right before their first growing season, uncertainty developed over hemp’s future: Wisconsin was going back and forth on the legality of CBD after Brad Schimel, Wisconsin’s attorney general at the time, issued a statement deeming CBD illegal; the office then reversed that decision in May 2018.
Like most first-time hemp farmers in Wisconsin, Matt had to sift through lots of information to research how to plant, harvest and dry hemp. He grows without pesticides, saying that the plant’s natural terpenes and cannabinoids provide a natural defense against pests. He uses organic compost and fertilizer. Weeds were a challenge, particularly due to record rainfalls and unusually wet springs. In 2018, he planted clover as a cover crop, but he still had to put in a lot of man hours weeding by hand. For the 2019 growing season, he instead planted into plastic mulch and used drip tape for irrigation.
“The crop ended up being be successful, even though I didn’t think so at the time,” he chortles. “We had a record of rainfall and the plants lost leaves because of too much rain. I didn’t think that was a good thing, but in the end, it didn’t harm the flower or the CBD. Because the plants didn’t have many leaves, it was easier to dry and process.”
Matt observes that there weren’t many processing facilities in Wisconsin when they first started, so he decided to do the extracting himself. “I did a lot of research on equipment and best processing, and it worked out well. I grow in summer and process in winter.” To help with processing, Matt hired a consultant from Colorado’s established hemp industry.
The biggest challenge was deciding on which extraction method to use. “There are so many equipment manufacturers out there and everyone says theirs is the best: CO2, or alcohol, or some people use propane or butane—which I don’t believe in at all. I decided on the chilled alcohol extraction method for its efficiency and simplicity. It produces a cleaner, full spectrum extract.”
He processed the CBD from the cherry strain into full spectrum tincture that’s currently available directly from the company through their website. In 2019, they experimented with other varieties and will soon bottle CBD from their electra strain.
“We keep varieties separate when we extract,” Matt adds. “I don’t mix up any terpenes, and we put the name of variety right on bottle, so people know what they’re getting. Some companies use oil from many different hemp varieties and don’t care about keeping them separate, but each plant has a different terpene profile.”
He says that with full spectrum chilled alcohol distraction, nothing is added or taken out, leaving in beneficial terpenes and cannabinoids that provide the entourage effect. Whole plant compounds work synergistically to magnify the therapeutic benefits of the plant’s individual components.
For more information, visit stonelakehemp.com.
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