If ‘high heals’, then a visit to Hempstock Pharms should be on the agenda of any visitor to Woodstock, Illinois. But aside from producing the finest-quality cannabis products, the farm also benefits the environment and the local community, as founder Stacy McCaskill tells us.
Set in commercial farmland 80 km/50 miles northwest of Chicago, Woodstock, population circa 25,000, might not seem a likely haven for progressive culture. But the historic town, whose quintessentially small-town-America streetscapes stood in for Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania in the movie Groundhog Day, has over the years attracted a diverse community of farmers, artists and city sophisticates embracing a gentler pace of life. Among them is Stacy McCaskill, an educator, entrepreneur and business management adviser who settled here after consultancy work for the women-led Illinois Hemp Growers Association in 2018 sparked a passionate interest in the newly legal crop.
“My wife and I have always wanted to live in Woodstock,” says Stacy. “There’s great community engagement here. We found this property in 2019 and I was like, ‘That is a perfect location for a hemp farm’. And my wife agreed. So we purchased it and within days put our first plants in the ground.”
Five years on, this 100 per cent organic, seed-to-label cannabis farm on 13 acres produces a broad range of topicals, tinctures, edibles, smokables and drinkables with diverse health and recreational applications. There’s a selection too of veterinary products, developed with input from Stacy’s wife, vet Dr Ronda DeVold, who has assembled a small menagerie of rescue horses, dogs, birds and a cat to share their new home. Hempstock Pharms also offers educational visits exploring the myths and myriad health benefits surrounding hemp, and the positive contribution ethically farmed cannabis can make to sustainable land practices. And its occasional community farming days can see up to 50 volunteers turning up to help harvest and process the plants. “We think this industry is really important, to health, farming and the environment,” says Stacy, “and we have neighbours who love and support us.” Among these is Ramshackle Farm in Harvard, a queer-/trans-owned smallholding which sells pesticide-free vegetables at Woodstock’s farmers’ markets, and last year launched the punk music festival Trans-Farm-Ation.
A key Hempstock team member is Alexa, a non-binary volunteer labourer who drives into Chicago most weekends to perform at one of several thriving ‘grotesque burlesque’ drag nights. “It’s they/them on the farm, she/her when I’m performing,” they say. “As Spicy Tarantina, I’m ultrafem in a kind of horror genre way. I actually did a show here for the first time last year, at the Pourhouse bar. I was pretty nervous, but it was great, the place was packed. Stacy came with her mom. It was beautiful.”
Photography courtesy of Hempstock Pharms
