MACHIAS, Maine (WABI) – Maine has hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland.
One family-run farm in Downeast Maine is helping not only their local community but tackling an environmental issue.
Ben Edwards is the owner of Schoppee Farm in Machias.
The 1,500-acre farm has been in his family for eight generations.
Edwards, who has a background in biochemistry and medicine, reopened its doors six years ago.
What once was a dairy farm is now being used to grow organic hemp. Hemp production was legalized in the U.S. with the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill.
Schoppee Farms first crop was in 2019.
“We produce most products that you could put CBD in,” Edwards said.
Schoppee Farm sells natural products from topicals to edibles that help treat a variety of ailments.
“In the United States, hemp is cannabis with less than 0.03% THC. So, any amount of our product is not going to hurt anyone,” Edwards explained. “Worst thing that is going to happen is you get a good night’s sleep. There’s no overdose. There are no deaths. There’s none of the stuff that really scared me off from modern medicine.”
In addition to growing hemp outdoors and selling natural products, Edwards is also researching how the plant can be used to clean up PFAS.
Studies have shown that the synthetic chemicals can be found in various products and can be harmful to our health.
“Hemp is a great bio aggregator which means it pulls all kinds of things out of the soil, which is good and bad, so if you have somewhat dirty soil, you don’t want to grow it because it will pull all the chemicals into the plant, but we can use that same mechanism to pull things that we don’t want out of the soil out of the plant,” he added.
This spring, Edwards plans to plant just down the road from the farm at the Machias Airport.
“It’s contaminated, but it’s not disastrously contaminated like a Superfund site, and that is closer to what say a dairy farmer’s field would look like,” Edwards said. “All of the other solutions that I have seen proposed were not appropriate on the scale of the problem. This is something that can be scaled up. We can grow thousands of acres of hemp quite easily, and so, getting to transition out of the greenhouse this year and into the airport where we can finally start to get some scale is really exciting.”
“That’s a lot of what we are testing in the greenhouse is what is the cocktail that allows the plants to uptake the most amount of PFAS in a given period of time. It will take years and years of growing in the same soil to make a difference, and we just have to get that down from hundreds of years to ten,” Edwards added.
Other research is being done across the state to help fight these ‘forever chemicals.’
While this may not combat the issue altogether, Edwards says they have the ability to potentially remediate some of the agricultural lands across Maine that have gone out of production.
“Our farmland is vast, and this is a solution that could scale to that – to the scale of the problem. That is what’s most exciting to me,” he said.
Click here to learn more about the farm and the products they offer.
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One family-run farm in Downeast Maine is helping not only their local community but tackling an environmental issue. Read More
