Today we’d like to introduce you to Jana Bailey.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My name is Jana Lyman Bailey and I come from a long line of pioneers and farmers. I’m the 4th generation to live and farm on the land located 3 miles south of Blanding, Utah. My great-grandfather, Walter C Lyman and my grandfather, Fred S Lyman, were among the first people to discover the area around Blanding Utah. These ancestors envisioned great potential and opportunity in developing the this land into productive and beautiful farms and decided to settle this corner of SouthEast Utah.
I grew up working on this farm, “Lyman Farms”, from an early age helping to irrigate alfalfa fields from a ditch, hauling hay, picking rocks and sticks out of the fields, grubbing sage brush and driving tractors. I started earning an hourly wage ($0.50/hr.) at age eight and spent my entire summers from then on working on the farm. As soon as my legs could reach to push in a clutch my father taught me to drive tractors and I began to help with weeding, cultivating, plowing, harrowing and more. I continued to work on the farm until I was married and my husband and I embarked on our college educations and careers for the next ten years.
I enrolled at Utah State University in Logan Utah and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education. I spent the next two years teaching a combined 3/4th grade class in the town of La Sal Utah at the base of the majestic La Sal Mountains.
My little family then moved to Minnesota for several years while my husband, Mitch, finished his master’s degree in Nurse Anesthesia. Upon completion of our education, we were able to move back home and live on “The Farm” and I continued to help my father on the family farm doing what I really loved to do! Gradually I took on more responsibilities in the alfalfa hay growing operation with my four children as my best “helpers”.
Farming in San Juan County is not for the faint-hearted as we are in a high desert area and are dependent on rain and plentiful snow pack in our beloved Blue Mountain. As most of the State of Utah has been in a prolonged drought for years, I began searching for a crop to replace our alfalfa that would use less water. With the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill that legalized hemp production, I started my adventure in this emerging hemp industry.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Oh my! My adventure in growing hemp has been anything but a smooth road! As I reflect back on the last 5-6 years it’s probably a good thing, I was naive about the challenge of being able to grow a healthy hemp plant to maturity and then being able to harvest, dry, cure and then extract oil to make a product for retail sale.
The thing that drove my perseverance was the knowledge of how beneficial CBD/CBG and other cannabinoids are for us. I was amazed that an all-natural, plant-based oil can replace synthesized chemical drugs, opioids and prescriptions with no side effects. I felt a drive to raise a totally organic, chemical and pesticide free crop that can bless so many people’s lives with its all-natural products.
With every setback we encountered, which were numerous and expensive, the thought kept reverberating in my brain that “this plant is a God-given, natural and amazing plant that people need to have access to use” and kept me adapting, learning and continuing on this path to become successful.
The first year I grew hemp with another farmer on 2 acres, outside and in the ground. We spent hours planting, weeding, watering etc only to have bugs we had never encountered before suddenly show up and start ravaging the plants and stunting their growth.
After harvesting this first crop, we then needed someone to extract the oil for us. After finding a company to extract the oil into a distillate we then learned that the company would keep 40% of the distillate as their fee. This plant was too difficult to grow to be giving up that much oil and this is when I decided I needed to go from “seed to sale” and began to become vertically integrated in order to increase my chances of success in the industry.
The following year I planted outside on my own field with some different strains. A few days after getting all of our seedlings out of the nursery greenhouse and planted in the ground we experienced a “once in a lifetime hail storm” that pummeled the seedlings, destroyed the plastic top of my greenhouse and the siding and windows of my home.
The seedlings made a bit of a recovery and seemed healthy until it was time to harvest. We were then blessed with a massive extended rainstorm which was wonderful overall, but the rain went deep into the flower and we had our first experience with botrytis and root rot and lost the entire summer crop.
The next year I grew outside again in the ground but used a bio -degradable mulch layer and planted the seedlings further apart from each other to decrease the chance of mold. We still struggled with getting the watering/drying cycle adequate but were making gains in our nutrition and pruning methods. Not much to harvest this year either.
At this point I decided I needed to grow the hemp in a high tunnel greenhouse so I could protect the plants better from the elements. We planted the next summer in the newly erected 8 greenhouses in the ground and set out again full of hope and optimism. We were planting later than we hoped and so at harvest time the plants were only one-half as tall as they should have been. We struggled with root rot again as the ground here has a lot of clay and didn’t drain or dry out in between watering but we learned many hard lessons and did not repeat mistakes from previous years. We finally had a harvest and extracted oil and started to make some pain rub cream and tinctures which were incredibly effective.
This last summer we decided to grow our plants in the greenhouse and in 30 gallon felt pots so we could control our watering and nutrition regimens more efficiently. Also, we put a ground cover down to eliminate weed growth from the ground and to keep the heat down. Hurray!! We had finally fine-tuned our pruning, watering, nutrition and harvesting techniques and grew 5-6 foot tall, healthy, sticky, large beautiful hemp plants!!! We have figured out how to extract the oil without the use of solvents or chemicals and have a beautiful, terpene rich oil with high CBD and CBG levels that is going to be used in tinctures, pain rub, lip balm, bath bombs, body oil and other products.
The other somewhat interesting obstacle I have encountered is being a woman business owner. Women are treated quite differently than men still and not taken very seriously. For example, with any business interaction if my husband or one of my male employees is with me, all communication is directed to that male rather than me. Every single time without fail.
I was raised to treat others with respect and to give 100% all the time to whatever project I take on. Living by these engrained set of values has brought me an amazing family-like team at Bears Ears Farms as well as many priceless relationships and ways to be of service to others.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Background Information of Bears Ears Farms
The San Juan County farmland used for Bears Ears Farms has been in the Lyman family for over 100 years with devotion given to details, efficiency and quality in serving the local communities. Our experience in organic wheat and alfalfa farming prepared us to grow this premium, organically grown natural hemp plant.
After using a CBD cream and tincture and being amazed at its effectiveness along with searching for a crop that would use less water to replace alfalfa and wheat due to the continuing droughts in San Juan County, Bears Ears Farms was founded in 2017 by multi-generational farmer, Jana Bailey. We have steadily been building infrastructure to enter and capitalize on the projected trillion dollar emerging new industry for industrial hemp and its products.
At Bears Ears Farms we control and oversee the entire process from seed to sale to maintain and ensure the highest quality control of our hemp products. We have developed a genetics hemp plant program and have several established stable strains to clone from that will enable us to have a continuous supply of premium 100% organically grown hemp plants without the use of any chemical fertilizers or pesticides.
ALL of our hemp plants receive individual, custom-formulated nutrients precisely delivered at each stage of its growth cycle. We then harvest, dry and cure the plants with our own unique system to remove the chlorophyll (hay) smell and taste so only the natural terpenes contained in each variety come through strong.
After this curing process we extract the oil from these meticulously cared for plants in our on-site processing kitchen/lab to extract the CBD and CBG oils without the use of chemicals or solvents so that we can create and offer one of the purest, 100% organically grown, full spectrum quality products which are truly unique in the emerging hemp market.
We have a proprietary method of processing the flower, where we don’t use any solvents or chemicals. This makes our company very unique because we are able to get a full spectrum oil rather than an isolate or distillate which most other companies use to make their products. There is a huge difference between full spectrum and broad spectrum.
Here is the difference between broad spectrum and full spectrum:
Broad Spectrum- is isolating select cannabinoids from the plant by using solvents such as Ethanol alcohol, butane, CO2 etc. Most extraction companies use this method to extract the oil from the hemp flower. BUT, when these solvents are used, all of the plants’ natural lipids, waxes, fats, and valuable terpenes are stripped and removed completely. All that is left is the CBD oil and residual solvents. Then they may try to add terpenes back into the CBD oil. These extraction methods are inferior and residual solvent(s) are present
Full Spectrum-
Full spectrum is obtained when extracting oil from the hemp flower without the use of solvents, so that ALL of the plants’ fats, lipids, waxes, natural terpenes and ALL cannabinoids (not just CBD) remain intact and in their natural state. This method of extraction allows the full entourage effect of our oil which is pure and a potent medicine.
This is part of what makes us so unique and sets us apart from other companies because it takes much more time and effort in extracting oil with our proprietary methods. We control every aspect from seed to sale or as we like to say, “From our Home to yours,–The Bears Ears Way!”
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
Finding a mentor with growing hemp has been very difficult. The one thing that has shocked me is how many shady people there are out there when it comes to hemp or cannabis. There are many people that say they can consult or help you and they’ll take your money, and then you don’t receive anything of value from them. Nobody really wants to share information and it’s extremely competitive.
Also, I was surprised at how much resistance to hemp continues to come from the state of Utah and the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food. The amount of regulation is ridiculous for a plant that can actually heal and has low THC levels.
For example, there were 319 Grower licenses issued in 2018 the first year Utah made them available. I’d be surprised if there are even 10 farmers still trying to grow in 2023. So, in a matter of a few years, UDAF put well over 300 farmers out of the hemp business when they could have been leading the nation in hemp production instead. Several multi-generational farms have gone under and multiple suicides have resulted because UDAF and the Attorney General’s office have been so opposed to seeing hemp farmers succeed in the state of Utah and have been so heavy handed in literally killing the hemp industry.
Contact Info:
- Website: bearsearsfarms.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bearsearsfarms/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BearsEarsFarms
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcr1uzrw_i1KPODTEIMueBw
