![](\"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Ben-Bickle_PrimeKindFarm-768x1024-2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
When Ben Bickle was growing up on his parent\u2019s farm in Grants Pass, OR, he learned to grow food, cut flowers, raise livestock and fell timber. Nearly everything they consumed came from the farm, the forest, the river or the sea. Owning a cannabis farm was nowhere near his thoughts.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought everyone lived like that,\u201d he says. \u201cI was 17 when I realized that wasn\u2019t the norm, and that people bought meat and produce at the store. The travesty is, most people don\u2019t realize where food comes from, how it\u2019s farmed, or how livestock is treated. They don\u2019t think about what they put into their bodies and how it got there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bickle\u2019s father worked as an agricultural advisor for the State of Oregon for 36 years, also teaching agriculture at the local high school, where he and his wife met. His mom was an art teacher, retiring a dozen years ago. His dad retired from both ag work and teaching in 2002.<\/p>\n
Ask any farmer what its biggest export is and they might tell you it\u2019s their children who leave the farm to find themselves in the world. That\u2019s precisely Ben Bickle\u2019s story.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI left the family farm for Alaska when I was 19 years old,\u201d he begins. \u201cI loved snowboarding and competed\u2014traveling on the road for outerwear companies. I\u2019d go to places in the winter where there was snow, then head to the rivers in the summer for fly fishing. It\u2019s all still here in Oregon, but I got the traveling part out of my system.\u201d<\/p>\n
After being gone for a decade, Bickle said he came back to the roost, following in his parents\u2019 footsteps, studying\u2014then teaching\u2014fine art at the same school his mom and dad taught at, while continuing to work the farm. And, more importantly, to raise his own children in the sustainable lifestyle he\u2019s come to love.<\/p>\n
The only difference today, he says, is he added hemp, then cannabis to the mix, when it was legal to do so.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe hemp and cannabis [additions to the farm] are all me,\u201d he says. \u201cMom and Dad have come to understand it all; and though Dad\u2019s retired from farming, he comes over and helps often.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Ben](\"https:\/\/cannabisnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Ben-Bickle_PrimeKindFarm.jpg\")
<\/a>As a young child, Bickle said he was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and was prescribed the pharmaceutical, Ritalin.<\/p>\n
According to the Center for Disease Control, \u201cADD is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders of childhood.\u201d Often lasting into adulthood, people diagnosed have a hard time focusing, paying attention and controlling impulsive behaviors\u2014often diagnosed alongside Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.<\/p>\n
As\u00a0cited in a PubMed report<\/a>,\u00a0Cannabis for the Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Report of 3 Cases<\/em>, the subjects questioned were already using cannabis for the condition, with all reporting, \u201csubjective improvements in symptoms and on quality of life.\u201d It was assumed and surmised by the doctors conducting the report, \u201cthat cannabis played a complementary role in the therapeutic regimen of the three patients.\u201d<\/p>\n Bickle credits his parents with being smart enough to prevent him from taking Ritalin, instinctively knowing that redirecting their rambunctious son to sports and farm work would help him focus.<\/p>\n They weren\u2019t wrong.<\/p>\n \u201cMy day began at five in the morning,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d feed and care for the animals, tended to the food we grew, whatever had to be done before school. I learned a serious work ethic on the farm, and combined with sports, it kept me busy and out of too much trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n He realized cannabis helped him focus just by smoking when he was a teenager but kept it under wraps on the farm and within his conservative farming community for many years. Today, he has a better understanding of how hemp and cannabis\u2014medicinal plants\u2014helped him over the years.<\/p>\n Oregon was the first state in the country to decriminalize possession of small amounts of cannabis in 1973, with a ticket given likened to a traffic offense making the offense tolerated for decades. In 1998, Oregonians voted to add medicinal use of the plant; then finally legalizing it for adult use after several failed attempts on the ballot, in 2014.<\/p>\n Prime Kind Farms was founded by his parents in 1972, with Bickle running its medical cannabis and hemp operation since 2008, in what he refers to as a polyphase farm, meaning having or producing two or more phases of a certain thing. For Bickle, his use of two terms together with \u201csustainable polyphase\u201d farming is having or producing two or more phases of agricultural products being grown or raised in a rotation with the land, on what it can yield efficiently and effectively given the season or year.\u00a0<\/p>\n Many farms, he says, are monocultured, with Prime Kind Farms able to be highly diversified and non-stagnant as they can be.<\/p>\n \u201cWe run two acres of hemp, while rotating our land use, sourcing all our own livestock compost as our only feed for the hemp, from 75 to 150 head of hogs,\u201d he says. \u201cWe aren\u2019t allowed to feed the livestock hemp, which is a shame, as they\u2019d benefit from it. All our livestock graze free-range on the farm.\u201d<\/p>\n According to an article in GlobeNewswire.com<\/a>, prior to the prohibition of hemp in the US, all livestock grazed on, what used to be called, \u201cragweed,\u201d that grew wild across the plains. With a full cannabinoid and terpene profile, the grazing feed was loaded with beneficial compounds, that were then passed down to the consumer for optimal health.<\/p>\n Sadly, the 2018 Farm Bill<\/a>, allowing American farmers to grow hemp again, have restricted hemp byproducts to be fed to livestock. This is something that makes little sense to Bickle and is an issue hemp farmers are working to change.<\/p>\n The apples didn\u2019t fall to far from the family tree, as Bickle\u2019s kids are showing an interest in art, as well as working on the hemp farm.<\/p>\n \u201cJust like my mom was, I\u2019m the only fine arts teacher at the high school, so I\u2019ve been able to teach a wide variety of mediums,\u201d Bickle says. \u201cI teach eight projects per semester, including drawing, painting, digital photography and sculpting.\u201d<\/p>\n Bickle says they\u2019re definitely an art family and will probably always own the cannabis farm, but he believes the cannabis market has to change.<\/p>\n \u201cUnless the market space for cannabis gets a little bit more understanding in realizing sungrown cannabis is more superior to indoor grown in a greenhouse, I\u2019ll keep teaching art, and we\u2019ll keep focusing on our food crops for our bread and butter,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n For decades food farmers on the North Coast\u2014stretching from Washington State to Northern California\u2014have been subsidizing with cannabis in order to allow them to be food farmers. In the case of the Bickles, adding cannabis when it was legal to do so, has added another much-needed revenue stream, but it\u2019s also introduced an unexpected element: ridicule.<\/p>\n \u201cCannabis use still has a negative stigma attached to it,\u201d he says. \u201cAs educators in our community, we\u2019ve had to walk a fine line in farming legal cannabis. It\u2019s added a whole other layer concerning education on the benefits of the plant, while we maintain respect as longtime, established food farmers and educators in the community.\u201d<\/p>\n The post Face of the Farmer: Prime Kind Farms<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
When Ben Bickle was growing up on his parent\u2019s farm in Grants Pass, OR, he learned to grow food, cut flowers, raise livestock and fell timber. Nearly everything they consumed came from the farm, the forest, the river or the sea. Owning a cannabis farm was nowhere near his thoughts.Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":502,"featured_media":57069,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6726,16462,16463,50,254,5,296,16464,139,185,16465,3230,2765,9780,16466],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57068"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/502"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57070,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57068\/revisions\/57070"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Food, Swine\u00a0& Weed<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Art & Ag<\/strong><\/h4>\n
<\/a>
\n
\nRead More: Face of the Farmer: Prime Kind Farms<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"