Local entrepreneur aims to help the community through two unique business ventures

LUMBERTON 一 Resident and entrepreneur Brandis Strickland has launched two businesses in the last year, both aimed to assist the people in his community and beyond.

Strickland’s businesses are quite different from each other: hemp products and worm castings. However, for him, the two are connected.

“I grew up in foster care, if you will,” Strickland said, “and one of the things they like to do is put kids on anti-depressants and behavior modification medicines. I was always into ‘self-medicating,’ if you will, and hemp was one of the things I resulted to a lot.”

Strickland was placed into foster care at age 8, spending the next 10 years of his life going between foster homes, adoptive families and group homes.

While in the foster care system, Strickland was given an Adderal prescription to help his ADHD. Unfortunately, the effects of his childhood left him vulnerable to addiction.

“My mother and sister died of drug overdoses,” Strickland said. His Adderal prescription was his gateway into a drug addiction of his own. On his website, nhchemp.shop, he wrote that after Adderal, he fell into opiate usage and then to crystal meth and cocaine, “plummeting into chaos” before he knew it.

Strickland said that when he realized where he was in life, he found his way to get out of the chaos and beat his addictions, and it was hemp.

While cannabinoids are well-known for being the main chemical in hemp and cannabis products, researcher Raphael Mechoulam discovered that the human body naturally creates the same chemical in 1988. However, when made inside the body, it is called endocannabinoid.

Later research, expanding on Mechoulam’s research, showed that the chemical has several functions, such as keeping energy levels stable, lowering blood pressure, reducing pain, stimulating the appetite, controlling nausea and reducing anxiety.

Strickland learned about the endocannabinoid system and the effects it has and decided to try and use it to his advantage to get away from his addictions, and it worked alongside more effects.

“PTSD is something I carry from my childhood,” said Strickland, “so say I’m having a flare-up, I can take an edible, and it balanced me out to the point where I’m able to put those thoughts and emotions back where they were and focus on my life.

“I’m a wonderful father, and using cannabis allows me to be that because one of my goals is not to let [my kids] know what happened to me as a child, to break the chain.”

Strickland owns and operates Nature’s Herbal Cabinet, which sells organic and natural hemp products. He chose to stay in Lumberton to help break the negative association that comes with the plant and to help others like him in his hometown who could benefit from cannabis use.

Strickland’s other venture came along after his hemp business began. As he worked with American hemp farmers and began growing his own, Strickland became interested in creating his own worm castings and optimizing the process.

“This misnomer is that it takes 6-8 months to make castings,” Strickland said. “What I’ve discovered is that’s with ‘x’ amount of worms in an ‘x’ size bin. If you change those values, like I have, and you increase the population drastically and make sure you have the right environment, and you have essentially a paper shredder.”

Strickland said that his worms produce fertilizer on an approximately 21-day cycle. He estimates his worm population is at least 250,000, spread across numerous bins of varying sizes.

Alongside the castings, Strickland is planning to begin breeding worm populations to sell so home gardeners can start their own worm casting bin.

Strickland hopes to work alongside local school systems and introduce them to worm farming in their agriculture programs. He also plans to work with medical professionals in his hemp business. Both ventures are still in the early stages.

To see Strickland’s work, visit nhchemp.shop and organiclifeamendments.com for hemp products and worm castings, respectively.