It was the early 1930s when Farmulated CBD Owner Mark Troyer’s father Clifford Troyer rode with his family some 980 miles from Milford, NE to Union City, PA. The family quickly began farming potatoes and, in 1967, Clifford and brother Cletus established Troyer Potato Products, which eventually morphed into the regionally beloved potato chip company, Troyer Farms.
Mark quickly became engrained in the life of the potato farmer, with early memories of riding the tractor with his father “around age 5,” he speculates. Being born into a farming family in the 1960s was being absorbed by an ever-changing natural world, with calloused hands perpetually etched in soil and a sun-up-to-sun-down mentality bred from a sharp decline in U.S. farms from the 1930s Dust Bowl era through the 1970s. The Troyer family, however, set firm roots and today farm over 2,500 acres of produce, the latest of which is hemp.
Following the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, Mark saw newly legalized hemp as a means of getting back to a more traditional, less mechanical form of farming. This nostalgia for traditional farming isn’t just rooted in familial memories. A recent American Farm Bureau survey shows only one in five participants surveyed has a high level of trust in modern agriculture, despite 88 percent trusting farmers themselves.1 The disconnect between farmer and final product spreads across multiple areas, but general concepts like safety and sustainability lie at the forefront of the conversation. With just over one percent of the American population working as farmers,2 it is easy to see how healthy skepticism among the other 99 percent can grow.
Yet for Mark, the quality he most wishes Farmulated CBD to be known for is “consumers’ ability to trust us.” He stresses Farmulated CBD is not a new-wave hemp company with a supply chain spanning multiple companies and states, but rather a farm-to-family operation with direct control over the growth, processing and distribution of its products. Growing hemp, in his opinion, is completely unlike the modern agriculture consumers have become skeptical of, but a hands-on, or hands-in-the-dirt, venture.
In an age of overprocessed living, it’s the type of environmentally interconnected, picturesque farming Americans want to visualize when they close their eyes. With Farmulated CBD, a company that unknowingly gained its roots when a Nebraskan family first touched Pennsylvania soil 90 years prior, that vision is a reality.
Sources:
1. Moore, T. (2020, January 15). Public Attitudes about Farmers and Farming: A Golden Opportunity. American Farm Bureau Federation. https://www.fb.org/viewpoints/public-attitudes-about-farmers-and-farming-a-golden-opportunity.
2. Lepley, S. (2019, May 30). 9 mind-blowing facts about the US farming industry. Business Insider. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/farming-industry-facts-us-2019
