- [Leah] Wow, okay so the last time I came to visit
this was full of chickens.
- [Mike] There was about 45,000 chickens in this house.
- To imagine what to do with this space instead is exciting.
Like, to think you've got this huge warehouse.
What can we do with it?
- [Mike] Yeah.
- [Leah] And you've imagined something.
- Well I've decided to convert from raising broiler chickens
to trying to raise industrial hemp in these buildings.
And I've a friend in Franklin who has cancer
and he's been through radiation and chemo and all that
and he was in terrible pain in his joints and everything
and none of the drugs helped him and he started taking CBD
and he says he feels like a new man.
- What's your vision for this?
What do you see in the future could happen
with this area of West Virginia for this kinda product?
What could it do for rural America?
- I hope it creates a whole lot of new jobs
and new revenue for the farm.
You know farmers in America are in bad shape.
- Who is big animal ag benefiting?
Why is it perpetuating?
- Wall Street, mostly.
Pilgrim's Pride, who I raised chickens for, in 2015 and '16
they paid their stockholders $1.2 billion in dividends.
It'd been almost 20 years since
their growers had had an increase in pay.
That's wrong, I don't care what anybody says.
So I'm tryna do my part to get that changed.
- If we were walking through here a year ago, what was here?
- There was chicken litter 4-5 inches deep
and it was covered with chickens.
- Wall to wall.
- Yep. (chirping)
I went through three different kinds
of colored lights because in addition to white
the plants have to have colored light.
- Look at this, all right tell me what we're seeing here.
- These are my second round of indoor plants
that I started from seed.
- [Leah] Okay.
- Smells like marijuana.
I'm putting a thousand in each section
and I wanna get it to where at least once a month
I'm harvesting a thousand plants.
I'm gonna try to make it available to the common folks.
Which means $50 an ounce or less.
For poultry, when they were big birds
they were drinking 8,000 gallons of water a day.
When I get the houses set up full of plants,
with both houses that will probably be half that.
- [Leah] How much more money would it make, you think, net?
Have you worked the math out?
- Once I get up to knowing what I'm doing,
should be somewhere in the $2 million a year range.
My net's gonna be 40-50%.
- That's great, and in comparison to chickens what were you?
- Well I think the best year I had
with chickens was I netted $7,000.
- Oh! (laughs)
I gotta get like a selfie of me and you
'cause I'm just blown away by this right now.
There we go, good.
So you're gonna use half the water,
you're gonna make way more money
I Hope
and you're gonna employ five times the amount of people.
That's a pretty good deal, seems like a win-win.
- If it all works out.
I'm gonna do a pet CBD line too.
- Oh yeah, I've heard about that for pets.
- Oh yeah, a lot of people give it to their pets.
Older dogs and horses.
And I just talked to this guy the other day,
that's given it to his horses.
- What happened to that horse you had here?
- They're in the field over across the river over there.
- Oh yeah.
Is there any judgment about it, being hemp, or no or like?
- Well a lot of 'em they're raising their eyebrows
every time you say something, you know.
They're thinking it's something illegal that I'm doing.
You know, I was a law enforcement officer for 34 years,
I'm not all of a sudden going to become an outlaw.
You can see how the flowers are
starting to develop on these.
- [Leah] Yeah, show me where the flowers are.
- All these little buds coming out here.
See each one of those is a flower.
- [Leah] Really smell it.
- [Mike] See all the flowers on here?
- [Leah] Yeah, there's a ton in here.
- [Mike] All of these get big
and fat hopefully be full of oil.
It forms a clump around the top.
- [Leah] Oh yeah.
- People call it buds like what they call it
on a marijuana plant, like it's milking.
- Yeah it's a nice smell.
It's revolutionary, what he's doing.
It's the future, I hope for for farmers, for rural America.
Where it's not just about tearing down the farms that exist.
It's about building something better.
Building something that takes some consideration
the farmer and what they need to live,
the environment that these farms are in,
the products that people actually want
and of course the animals.
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