Page 87 - Innovation Delaware 2021

JEN STARK AND BILL ROHRER
Ezy Venture: Pioneering Hemp Processing in the First State
Brother and sister team JEN STARK and BILL ROHRER have put their talents together to form Ezy Venture, the first hemp processing facility in Delaware, giving local growers an affordable alternative to shipping
out of state.
“It costs a lot of money to ship [hemp], so if you’re shipping
to the states that have more mature markets, like Kentucky or Colorado, it gets very expensive,” Stark explains. “We’ve had customers where we’ve processed 20,000 pounds — that’s a lot. One super sack could be around 250 to 300 pounds of biomass.” That’s enough to fill a large pickup truck.
Launched in Harrington in 2019, and built in part on a $100,000 EDGE (Encouraging Development, Growth and Expansion) Grant from the Delaware Division of Small Business, Ezy Venture is taking an innovative approach to hemp processing: being open and accessible. Stark and Rohrer’s names and contact information are right there on the landing page of the company’s website. For a typical agriculture business here in Delaware, this might seem like no big deal. But in the U.S. hemp industry, which was only completely legalized in 2018 by act of Congress, the stigma of the marijuana plant is hard to shake.
Hemp and marijuana come from the same species of plant — the difference is in the end product. Marijuana is cultivated to have the highest possible concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Hemp, by law, has to have a vanishingly low concentration of THC; its main commercial end product is cannabidiol (CBD), which is legal across the country. Hemp growers, therefore, have to carefully monitor THC levels and be
sure to harvest before those levels get too high. Not surprisingly, hemp crops have to conform to strict U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations, which are enforced by the state, and farmers are required to test early and often for THC levels.
“I think even in the last year, more people know what hemp is and the medicinal values of cannabinoids, so it’s just about education and answering questions,” Stark says. “We are registered with the State of Delaware — everything has to be less than 0.3 percent [THC] — we have in-house analytical testing capabilities to test any biomass and our products.”
Stark and Rohrer are well-qualified for the space: she has a bachelor’s in civil engineering from the University of Delaware, has taught environmental law and policy, and comes to the table with a career’s worth of experience in environmental engineering; he studied agriculture and environmental protection at West Virginia University, has a master’s of management in public administration from Wilmington University, and is a well- established agronomist and plant scientist.
Ezy Venture takes cured hemp from farmers and uses ethanol (chilled to minus 40 to 60 degrees Celsius), a centrifuge and filtering to turn it into either crude extract or distillate. In distillate form, CBD can be a tincture (drops), a capsule, a salve and even a lotion. With the market still at an early stage, figuring out the most profitable end product depends on when you ask: prices for crude and distillate have fluctuated in the few years the market has been open. “If you think just about Delaware and people being connected to the market and having buyers and
sellers,” Stark says, “the network is developing.”
—Matt Ward
INNOVATION DELAWARE 85