We recently connected with Tasha Mueller and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tasha, thanks for joining us today. When you’ve been a professional in an industry for long enough, you’ll experience moments when the entire field takes a U-Turn, an instance where the consensus completely flips upside down or where the “best practices” completely change. If you’ve experienced such a U-Turn over the course of your professional career, we’d love to hear about it.

When we started growing hemp 3 years ago, the trend & money was in smokable CBD flower. So we put a ton of money, time & energy into growing 11,000 plants for smokable CBD. I took us a team of 8-12 people 5-6 days a week for 9 weeks to harvest it all! That was the 1st year of Covid, some states legalized marijuana & lots of people grew a LOT of CBD. Needless to say, we couldn’t give the flower that we worked so hard growing & harvesting away. A few months ago, we dumped out the last 1,000 lbs that we had of it & had a big bonfire. A very expensive & labor heavy shift! Now we grow only 2,000 plants & use them mostly for gummies & tinctures.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Tasha. In a previous life I was a corporate event planner who traveled the world planning events for Fortune 100 companies. Now, Im a hemp farmer, and besides being a snorkel instructor in the Caribbean its my favorite job! 3 years ago, I went part-time at my corporate job with a dream to get away from emails & spend my days outside, dogs at my side, hands in the dirt growing something I fully believed in. I had been searching for years what I wanted to do that was closer to my passion. What lite my soul on fire & what if I was going to be away from my family did I want to do. A good friend, and local organic farmer suggested I look into growing hemp. It had just been passed to grow legally & was getting great traction. My family all lives on a 118 year old farm that over the decades has become surrounded by subdivisions & urban life. I grew up on this farm. My grandpa was born, raised & worked this farm his entire life & I don’t want to see it disappear in my lifetime or my children’s. So we decided to take a leap (& a loan!) and start growing hemp. Its been a HUGE learning curve the last 3 seasons & our direction has changed from where we started but I still go to bed at night physically exhausted from manual labor (believe me, I LOVE THIS!) and my heart is full. We grow hemp organically on our family farm and make CBD & CBD:CBG products from those plants we grow with love. We also started doing events in the fields. Education is one of my biggest challenges with CBD. We do yoga in the hemp fields, ecstatic dancing, planting & harvest parties & more! During each event we educate people about the plant, its uses & potential ways it can help your health. We’re family owned & operated on land that has been in our family for generations. As a woman owner & head farmer, what sets us apart from the competition is our values. We are transparent, want only the best for our customers & put all that we are into growing the best plants. My grandfather instilled in me that hard work, dedication & a deep respect for the land & mother nature will always leave you richer in heart & spirit than any paycheck.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

When I started, I had ZERO training! I watched lots of youtube videos & talked to some people in the industry that had done it. It was a lot of trial & error and an amazing support system around me. My cousin has an agriculture degree & has been farming his whole life, my other cousin works in Washington State on marijuana & hop farms and has a masters in dirt (LOL!) and my whole family- aunts, cousins, parents, etc live on the farm. Without this support ecosystem I would NOT have made it through the 1st year!

If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?

1,000 times yes. It hasn’t worked out how we envisioned it when we started planning almost 4 years ago, but I love it!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rrfarms1904.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/randrfarms1904/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/randrfarms1904
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/tasha-mueller-9a961428

Image Credits
Tom Carrow Jennifer Hunn-Brewer