Source: kentucky.com
Laura’s Hemp Chocolates products including dark chocolate wafers, dark chocolate bark and dark chocolate truffles. They are for sale in Kroger regionally and online at Laurasmercantile.com.
Laura Freeman, who founded Laura’s Lean Beef, has a new mission: She’s saving the planet and Eastern Kentucky with hemp chocolate and moonshine.
That might sound like impossibly ambitious except Freeman has already succeeded in one hide-bound industry: she turned her small family cattle operation into a multimillion-dollar brand of antibiotic-free and hormone-free beef sold in supermarkets everywhere.
But when she started Laura’s Lean Beef in 1985, it was an anomaly in a sector dominated by factory farming.
Freeman sold her business in 2007-08, following a serious riding accident that required months of rehabilitation. She also sold her cow herd and moved to Martha’s Vineyard, which she thought would be paradise.
“I couldn’t stand it,” she said. “It was a bunch of pontificating people who think they are smarter than us.”
She had participated in the Donella Meadows fellowship program focused on sustainability. Afterward, fellows were to go back to their homes and work on climate change, she said. “Everybody else went back to California or Europe and I came back to Kentucky.”
Laura Ann Freeman has launched Laura’s Hemp Chocolates from her Mount Folly Farm in Winchester. Freeman has partnered with Ruth Hunt Candies to produce organic hemp chocolate with healthy ingredients.
She worked on turning her Mount Folly Farm into a carbon “sink” or absorber. Her daughter, Alice Johnson, had already succeeded in having the farm certified organic.
And Freeman began looking for ways to develop the regional economy. She started growing hemp and needed to figure out what to do with it locally.
She hit upon chocolate and began fiddling around with recipes.
“I had interns making it,” she said. “And we sold it at farmers markets.”
Eventually, she went to Larry Kezele at Ruth Hunt Candies in Mount Sterling.
“I said, let’s make some hemp chocolate,” she said. “And we came up with wafer, truffles and the bark.”
Now, Laura’s Hemp Chocolates has landed at Kroger. But that’s probably as far as they will go in terms of wholesale distribution, Freeman said. And she expects the chocolates to only be distributed regionally.
A tin of dark chocolate bark made with organic hemp seed and cranberries at Mount Folly Farm in Winchester.
“The attempt is to keep it very local,” she said. They will sell through Laura’s Mercantile online and at a store on the farm and in businesses in the area, “so we’re developing the local economy.”
Next she will turn her attention to the other things she’s been growing on the farm: heritage grains.
She’s already selling cornmeal ground by Weisenberger Mill.
This spring Freeman plans to start a distillery, Wildcat Willy’s, in a building she’s purchased in downtown Winchester.
“I trademarked ‘The Moonshine Trail,’” Freeman said. The idea is to grow heritage grains such as Bloody Butcher, Hickory King and Aztec Blue corn, plus wheat and rye on the farm, distill it into moonshine and eventually age it, too.
And she’ll offer tours of the farm and the distillery to promote agritourism.
“The idea is to get other distilleries involved, and I’m aiming east. My charge is to revive the Appalachian economy,” Freeman said. “There’s something to the revival of small agriculture … I’m looking at this for the rest of my life. This is where I’m going to spend my time and my resources.”
At her Laura’s Mercantile shop at the farm, Laura Freeman sells chocolates made with hemp grown at Mount Folly, plus other items such as cornmeal made from her heritage grains. Soon she plans to open a distillery in Winchester. Alex Slitz aslitz@herald-leader.com
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