ABOUT

My journey began in Minnesota in 1986. I grew up on our family farm in Hampton, MN. It’s a beautiful place, great for someone who loves animals and the great outdoors. From the age of three, I was obsessed with the sport of skiing. This obsession became my driving force in life, first as a competitive racer, mogul skier and free skier, and then later as a film skier. As a skier, I won many medals and events, starred in ski films and got to ski places most could only dream of! But with all that skiing came a downside, sometimes I crash and get injured.

In all of my years of skiing, there have been several bad injuries. This is one of the main things that brought me to cannabis and hemp. I started working with cannabis as a medical patient and caregiver in Colorado over 10 years ago. I quickly discovered how important it was to have the cleanest medicine possible. After trying many growing styles that can be used to grow these plants, such as soil-grown hydroponic and aeroponics, I decided that I needed to listen to my intuition and go completely organic.

After making the change to organic, it was apparent that I was now growing truly high-quality medicine. After years of working with organic growing and developing a strong knowledge of what it takes to create a premium herb, it was time to take it even further. As many people may know organic means using only natural ingredients and no harmful chemicals. This is a good thing but not all organic practices are as clean as they can be, and for me, I could not continue to use things like bone meal, bat guano, or fish emulsion anymore. I had to remove these products from my production and the negative karma that comes with them. 

So I began to grow entirely vegan or plant-based. Which again makes the medicine I grow even cleaner and more sustainable. All of this knowledge helps me be able to have a great life.  I am always looking forward to the next step. That next step came by way of getting offered the job as the grow master for South Park Farms and Haleigh’s Hope. South Park Farms is a medical and recreational wholesale grow operation in Fairplay, Colorado and Haleigh’s Hope is a CBD hemp company.

At this job, I was able to see what it was like to deal with hemp plants on a really large scale. It also opened my eyes to how much not only medical marijuana, but also hemp-derived CBD, can help people and myself. For a little over a year I worked nonstop on all of the many aspects of these grow facilities. It then came time to take all of this experience and knowledge and use it for a new adventure, to return to my roots in Hampton Minnesota and bring hemp and CBD to the family farm. So starting in late spring 2019 we began Darkhorse Hemp Farms.