KY Girl Hemp sells CBD products produced from hemp grown and processed in the Bluegrass State.
Rose Seeger is a farmer by trade. She still owns the same family farm she was raised on in Pendleton County.
Seeger went to engineering school and then worked for a telephone company for over 20 years. When the company started laying people off, she had already learned about rooftop gardening. She combined engineering, construction and agriculture and started Green City Resources in 2008. After experiencing the effects of her work on the rooftop gardens, Seeger was led to start her hemp business, KY Girl Hemp, in 2015.
Seeger sells cannabidiol products, also known as CBD. CBD is an active ingredient in cannabis that is derived from the hemp plant—a cousin of the marijuana plant. CBD does not cause a high by itself.
“Hemp helps a lot of people,” Seeger said. “It’s in that healing kind of scenario for me. I think that probably was another reason I was drawn to it. It helped me so much, and then I wanted to show other people ‘try this for that.’”
Seeger’s cousins in Cynthiana raise hemp for her business as well as neighboring farms, allowing her to track her product from its growth to final production.
Her two manufacturers are in Louisville and Bedford.
“I know every step of the way where this hemp has been, where it’s gone to, where it’s been processed, how it’s been processed, what products it’s going into,” Seeger said. “That’s important for me. Just like organic gardening, growing and not knowing where those things come from. I think that’s why our hemp stands out.”
Bedford is a little over an hour from the NNKY on the way to Louisville. Her manufacturer in Bedford, Pharm CBD, grows the hemp and processes and formulates Seeger’s and other brands’ final products.
“We specialize in manufacturing products for different brands and companies, chiropractors, Rose and other people that have stores, anyone that’s really looking for products,” said Michael Yates with Pharm CBD. “We do special formulas for certain clients.”
Pharm CBD raises its hemp plants from seedlings. They plant the seeds in late March and early April; by June, they are ready to go into the ground. The plants then grow until late September/early October until they are ready to harvest.
“When we harvest, we buck the flower or the bud off the plant stem,” said Evan Ogburn with Pharm CBD. “That makes our products more potent. It’s not diluted necessarily, especially on a large scale; when it comes to hemp processing and farming, they’ll just essentially do a silage chopper or break it down to where they’re getting stalk and stem included. We don’t do that. We take time to buck the flower off, and then once it’s bucked, it’s ready to be extracted.”
There are two walk-in coolers where the hemp is dried out. Within about a week, with dehumidifiers, the hemp is dried out and ready for extraction.
Ogburn said their grounds are USDA-certified organic, meaning everything they raise from a hemp perspective is USDA-certified organic. Their processing, extraction and formulation are also certified organic.
Their formulation and extraction are certified by Good Manufacturing Practices. This means that a product or process meets the requirements of Good Manufacturing Practices, a globally recognized standard for quality and safety in manufacturing.
Once the hemp is dry, it is milled down and run through a CO2 extraction machine. It then comes out as a “cake” and goes to distillation, where it is turned into oil that is added to products like the ones KY Girl Hemp sells.
“Definitely just all about helping people and giving people relief in a natural and safe way and knowing all of our batches are safe from testing that we do is really important to us,” Yates said.
Seeger sells products that help people with aches, pains and anxiety. She also has customers who come in with things like epilepsy and post-traumatic stress disorder. Seeger said the product also works for dogs and sells products for hip and joint arthritis and anxiety.
Seeger said she typically asks people about their pain or anxiety on a scale of one to 10 to determine the dosage they require. Products can be bought in the form of CBD oil, gummies and capsules and CBD lotions and salves.
You can typically find KY Girl Hemp at your local farmer’s markets like Fort Thomas from April through December and Covington year-round. KY Girl Hemp products are also available online.
One of Seeger’s regulars, Gina Estes, purchases a CBD lotion from her. Estes learned about KY Girl Hemp through friends and visits her at the Covington farmer’s market. She said the lotion helps her with chronic pain.
“It’s very helpful for just really bad joint pain,” Estes said. “That’s when I started bugging her, was to see if there was anything that would help really bad joint pain.”
Pharm CBD batch produces each item as seen in food or pharmaceutical production. They track and verify all ingredients before they are used in a product. Ogburn said all their finished goods are batch-tested, confirming potency on the back end.
“We have full traceability, essentially from start to finish, the fact that we are vertically integrated with control from seed to sale, essentially we don’t have to go outside to find extracts, etc.,” Ogburn said.
What is the difference between hemp and marijuana?
“For me, I always say marijuana gets you high; CBD makes you feel better,” Seeger said. “You don’t feel high. You don’t get a buzz. You just feel better, whether it’s the anxiety, whether it’s the aches and pains and anti-inflammatory.”
KY Girl Hemp also sells a Delta-8 and Delta-9 product, which Seeger said is closer to marijuana than hemp. Seeger said it is a super-intense THC (a cannabinoid found in cannabis that is the main psychoactive component of the plant) that can be felt from head to toe. She said the people who typically use this are in a lot of pain or have high anxiety.
Seeger was set up at the Fort Thomas Farmers Market on a Wednesday in September. A customer wearing a “combat vet” hat purchased two packs of the 25-milligram Delta-8 gummies.
Estes also purchases Delta 8 gummies from Seeger. She said the gummies help with pain management so that she’s not overwhelmed by the pain.
“Sometimes I’ll take those that helps me keep from getting into a fight at the deli counter on Fridays,” Estes said.
Seeger said all CBD, if it’s called full spectrum, has a small amount, roughly .03%, of THC.
“Finding a place that knows their product is important, and there are several stores around that know what they’re doing,” she said. “I’m not the only person, but definitely, it’s worth not going to the gas station.”
Customers must be 18 years old to buy CBD products and 21 years old to buy Delta products.
“They’ll give cancer patients marijuana to treat their pain, and it does, but they also have that where they’re getting high, and they may not like that feeling, and a lot of people get paranoia,” Seeger said. “When they get high, and they get scared, or they get more anxiety, even though their pain is gone. So, we’re a CBD. We don’t have that. It’s more of just a calming effect.”
Seeger said she is worried about the state taking away her ability to sell Delta products should recreational marijuana become legalized. She said the marijuana industry looks at someone like her as competition and will try to lobby to get those products taken away.
Further, Seeger said new bills are being introduced in the state requiring a $250 permit per year for every product sold.
“So that worries me because I like to have different products,” she said. “So that will reduce down some of the things that I have.”
Estes said she chooses to purchase her CBD products from KY Girl Hemp because she knows where the products come from and gets to support local farmers versus big box stores.
“There’s a quality of the ingredients and so forth that I can rely upon,” Estes said. “I don’t want to just buy whatever products they’re not all the same. And so you want somebody who’s really worried about the manufacturing process. So that’s a very important piece of it.”
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