Amish farmers rushed to grow cannabis in Pa. After an industrywide bust, can one man’s dream survive?

On a recent morning, the shelves at Lancaster County Marketing were lined with CBD root beer and cotton candy lollipops, hemp-infused honey and muscle salves, and CBD prerolled joints with names like Elektra and Special Sauce. A 300-pound sack brimming with leftovers from the local cannabis harvest, on its way to becoming highly prized CBD oil, suffused the office with a particular pungent smell. Across the driveway, the standardbred horse that transported CEO Reuben Riehl to work grazed near a small buggy.

Riehl, 29, is a cannabis visionary in Lancaster County, the cannabis capital of Pennsylvania. But despite the ubiquitousness of CBD in everything from soda to bath bombs, it’s hard to be a visionary these days. It’s nearly a full-time job for Riehl to convince his Amish community, and sometimes even himself, that selling hemp-derived wares is still a good idea.

Cannabidiol, or CBD, is one chemical compound in the hemp plant. To a layperson, hemp can look identical to marijuana; both fall under the umbrella of cannabis. But hemp contains less than 0.3% of Delta-9 THC, the psychoactive compound in marijuana that makes a person high. (For comparison, dispensaries sell marijuana that contains upward of 20% THC). In recent years the popularity of CBD has soared, with people turning to it for seizure disorders, arthritis and joint pain, anxiety, and insomnia.

Hundreds of years ago, hemp was a major cash crop in Pennsylvania, immortalized in Lancaster town names like East and West Hempfield. The more recent excitement about CBD arrived in Lancaster about five years ago. That was when the federal Farm Bill of 2018 made it legal to grow, process, transport, and sell hemp nationwide. In Pennsylvania and around the country, farmers rushed to grow it, enticed by promises of enormous profits.

It was a particularly promising crop to the Amish, who eschew most modern technology, because hemp benefits from being harvested by hand. Lancaster County is home to the largest Amish settlement in the country, with more than 44,000 residents, according to records compiled by Elizabethtown College.

As Amish farmers in Lancaster turned to cannabis, Riehl saw a business opportunity. He founded Lancaster County Marketing in 2020, partnering with local Amish growers to process, distribute, and market their products to the wider world. He liked the anonymity of “marketing” in the name he chose.

His sisters did much of the formulating (”Amish women cook, know how to mix things together,” Riehl said), and he made the business connections. To hedge against disaster, he also started two other companies around the same time, one that sells dietary supplements and another that sells zeolite, a substance known for its absorbent properties.

“I’m very intrigued by natural medicine,” he said. “I don’t like to use the word medicine because that goes with the pharmaceutical side of things. But we could call it therapeutic.”

Hemp cultivation in Pennsylvania turned out to be an overstated gold rush. A huge boom in CBD production in 2019 oversaturated the market, and many farmers ended up with no buyers for their crops, said Erica Stark, executive director of the National Hemp Association and chairwoman of the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council. Some farmers were never paid and plants simply withered in the fields, said Jeffrey Graybill, an agronomy educator at Penn State.

This year, the state permitted just 290 acres for hemp, in contrast to more than 4,000 in 2019, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. The majority of Amish farmers in Lancaster are back to tobacco as their cash crop of choice, Graybill said.

Riehl said he has never personally tried marijuana and doesn’t think recreational weed should be legal. But he has found CBD and other hemp products beneficial.

He maintains dreams of selling his CBD nationally, transforming Lancaster into a major player in the cannabis industry. For now, he works out of a low-slung building in Christiana, where he relies on a landline, a paper desk calendar, and an email-only device with no internet connection called a mailbug to make business deals. Messages are passed in person or written on sticky notes; he doesn’t have a cell phone.

He said if it made sense profitwise, he would also consider going into the business of magic mushrooms, another plant medicine with health benefits that is popular right now. (It is currently not legal in Pennsylvania to grow or sell mushrooms.)

Riehl now works with 10 local farms; last year he sold roughly 5,000 pounds of hemp flower and 26,000 pounds of what is called CBD biomass, the leftovers from the prime harvest that can be ground down into CBD oil. He sells most of the product wholesale to buyers on the East Coast and a small amount to retail customers. His storefront also sells handmade smoking paraphernalia and hot thermoses, like one that reads, “If we all had a bong, weed all get along.” Only about 1% of his cannabis customers are Amish, though he wishes that number was higher.

“There are some people in the community that are still completely against it. They think they can get high from it, it’s psychoactive, it’s not good,” Riehl said. “I think that’s the same thing on the outside, too. There’s just people who don’t understand the concept of hemp.”

In spite of the Farm Bill, CBD products exist in a legal gray area. The Food and Drug Administration has indicated that the way CBD is often sold, infused in food and drinks, is not lawful, said Josh Horn, cochair of the Cannabis Practice Group at Fox Rothschild in Philadelphia. Sellers are also not allowed to make any medical claims about it.

“People have lived in this gray area for quite some time,” Horn said. “As long as you don’t push the envelope too much and draw too much attention to yourself, the FDA will probably leave you alone.”

Riehl has also been conflicted about drawing attention to his business for religious reasons, though he did an interview with the Daily Mail last fall. He agreed to let The Inquirer identify him by name but asked that no photos of his face be included for religious reasons. For business purposes, though, he has decided to speak with the press.

Recently, he has also been speaking with lawmakers in Harrisburg, urging an increase in the percentage of THC allowed in hemp plants and clearer state regulations for cannabis products. There are no state or federal regulations for the labeling, testing, or safety of such products, Stark said.

Riehl sometimes fears that local law enforcement will decide abruptly that his products are not legal. The Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office sent Riehl’s company a memo last year warning that it was illegal to sell products containing Delta-8, another cannabinoid extracted from CBD. Riehl stopped selling them, deciding it wasn’t worth the risk.

He hopes the cannabis industry will stabilize soon, so that his company can truly take off.

“I don’t like the black market,” Riehl explained recently, “because it’s not stable.”