Growing hemp in Dripping Springs

Dripping Springs is a suitable place for growing a variety of vegetables and fruits like grapes and olives. Hemp (Cannabis Sativa L.) is another crop that can be added to the list. Aaron Owens, Owner of Tejas Hemp recently planted two acres. You can see the rows of plants on the right side of RR12, when headed south towards Wimberley.

“I’m extremely excited to be here. I love Dripping Springs. I’ve been here eight years. Same house, same spot,” Owens said. He didn’t, however, always have the ability to grow a hemp crop. It was just legalized in Texas last year.

“Texas has fully inoculated a program to allow us to not only distribute these products in Texas, but more importantly to cultivate them and manufacture them,” Owens said.

Helping people is the reason Owens pursued the hemp business. “I have a saddlemaker who’s in his mid 70s in west Texas and he was coming down with Parkinson’s. It was really starting to get the best of him. His son asked me if we could try this [hemp extract]. We gave him 25 milligrams twice a day and after five days, he thought he had beat Parkinsons,” Owens said.

He said that people are using hemp extracts and infusions to do things like increase their sleep quality, reduce anxiety, and reduce inflammation. Last week, Forbes released an article titled “New Research Suggests Terpenes And CBD Work 2x’s Better For COVID-19 Inflammation Than Corticosteroid.”

There are two common misconceptions about hemp. “It gets you high, which it doesn’t or that it’s marijuana, which it’s not,” Owens said. The community has been nothing but positive according to Owens. “Everybody’s receptive. Everybody’s cool,” he said.

Owens has been working in the hemp industry since 2015 and has a business partner in Evergreen, Colorado—EVG extracts. When wanting to establish a Texas brand, they put Tejas Hemp on paper in 2017. “That made me the first hemp brand in the state of Texas on paper post prohibition,” Owens said.

Another achievement for Owens and his business partner is developing significant methodologies and technologies for extracting oils from hemp—a patented process they call terpex. “We’re the only people in the world at this point to have the ability to extract an oil and terpenes from hemp as well as remediate the THC as well without ever touching ethanol. It’s a big deal in our industry” he said. “It maintains the integrity of what the plant has to offer.”

As for how the hemp industry will continue to develop in Texas, Owens foresees another part of the industry coming into play. “The future of Texas, which Tejas Hemp is heavily involved in, is going to be in the commercial, industrial side where we’re going for fiber and grain. That will very much be done out in the panhandle, the Rio Grande Valley. That’s where we go from one to two acres to thousands of acres. So, Dripping Springs is not going to be a place where we grow a bunch of hemp to make clothes,” Owens said.

Here, the focus is on the small scale boutique end of the market. For more information about Tejas Hemp, you can visit https://www.tejashemp.com/