Where alfalfa once grew on a plot in unincorporated Boulder County, fledgling hemp plants are pushing skyward.
On a recent weekday, Bob Sievers settled under a white canopy to shield himself from the sun and watched as workers dug holes by hand to fill long rows with hemp plants. The 83-year-old is a part-time University of Colorado professor, former CU regent and researcher. The university once described him as “the former CU regent who catalyzed the move of the university’s medical campus to the former Fitzsimons Army Medical Center, … a leading force in transforming the CU-Boulder campus into a hub of environmental research and scholarship, (and) an indefatigable crusader in the effort to eradicate measles worldwide with dry, inhalable vaccines.”
He’s also, now, a registered industrial hemp farmer and is studying its potential medical benefits as a side project. His industrial registration allows him to legally farm hemp for study.
He’s leasing about a half-acre of a larger hemp plot outside Lafayette, where this year he will grow about 1,000 plants, which can have no more than 0.3 percent THC, the principal psychoactive component in cannabis.
“I want people to understand all we can understand about cannabis chemistry,” he said.
In 2014, Sievers sought to learn more about the medical benefits of hemp when he heard that a family friend’s child was diagnosed with Dravet syndrome, a rare and severe form of epilepsy. He’d heard about cannabidiol, or CBD, and its anecdotal potential to reduce the frequency and intensity of seizures.
However, he found that CBD was expensive and hard to come by. So, Sievers — with help from his wife, Nancy, and his daughter, Christie Spencer — launched his next venture as an industrial hemp farmer and hemp researcher.
“The local marijuana companies and marijuana seed producers — at that point, hemp seeds were very, very hard to come by — really took him under their wing,” Spencer said. “I remember at one point in time touring a couple different facilities with both my parents, who were in their, at that time, 70s and thinking, ‘This is such a crazy world we’re in. I’m touring a marijuana grow with my parents.'”
Before that, Sievers had been studying air and water pollutants and aerosols, among other things, he said. In 2005, he’d led a 35-person, international team with a nearly $20 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a measles vaccine to be inhaled as a dry powder, which has an exponentially longer shelf life and doesn’t require syringes.
Now, he’s applying that research to his studies of hemp in a private lab, working and collaborating with other researchers. As the plants grow, he’ll examine what factors affect their growth, such as the amount of water they’re given. Come fall, after the plants are harvested, he’ll send them to selected contractors to extract and purify the CBD.
In working with other researchers, he’s examining the plant’s medicinal potential and chemistry; predictable, consistent dosing; and exploring administration methods, such as the dry inhaler. He’s also a senior adviser at KelSie Biotech, a Boulder-based LLC, of which Spencer is the vice president. The company is commercially developing his technology, Spencer said.
He’s hoping the passage of the federal Farm Bill, which proposed legalizing hemp, will allow him to expand his studies and gift the extracted material to CU professors for further study. He envisions running clinical trials and hopes hemp will help not only those with childhood epilepsy but a wide variety of diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Crohn’s.
He’s become a fountain of knowledge about hemp — frequently citing changing legislation in other states, international policies and burgeoning research efforts.
“He’s like a lightning rod,” Spencer said. “Anybody who’s interested in studying hemp finds him.”
Most days, Spencer said, even though they’ve hired people to care for the plants, Sievers circles the field to check on them and root out stubborn weeds with a hoe from McGuckin Hardware. He goes in the morning when the air is cool, and he lives for the work, she said.
“To follow my dad into this industry has been a treat and an adventure, to say the least,” Spencer said.
“For me, too,” he replied.
Cassa Niedringhaus: 303-473-1106, cniedringhaus@dailycamera.com
