8 December 15-21, 2022 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents products had reached approximately $1.2 bil- lion. As TayCo Farms points out on its website, hemp-derived CBD products from marijuana plants offer consumers a medicinal alterna- tive to pain relief often dominated by highly addictive narcotics. Taylor says his grandmother was a pot smoker for most of his life. She has scoliosis and at 81 she deals with aches and pains and arthritis by using cannabis. That led Taylor to start researching resin, the thick sticky oil marijuana produces. He began learning how to extract resin to create CBD products. He calls himself a health-conscious person who seeks to build a brand that allows people with health issues to use his product without it in- terfering with their daily activities. Taylor claims that what makes his com- pany different is that he and his sister are in their early 20s and part of a younger group of cannabis entrepreneurs who are press- ing the natural resin from hemp flowers. He uses heat and pressure to formulate the resin into products. He calls it a more or- ganic process with no chemical solvents. But he acknowledges that 45% of his busi- ness is on the smokable hemp side. Taylor ar- gues the Supreme Court ruling won’t end its use. It will simply force Texas farmers to sell their products in other states while out-of- state businesses are allowed to flood the Texas market with their smokable hemp products, causing money that should remain in Texas to flow out of state. “It’s not right,” Taylor says, using a quote that he heard from another hemp farmer to explain it in a way that even conservatives like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will understand: “‘How are you going to tell a Texas beef farmer you can’t sell steaks in Texas?’ Texas will hopefully get its head on straight.” *** I n 2020, Sarah Kerver was at home, think- ing about the upcoming first-ever hemp harvest season. A year had passed since the state began allowing Texas farmers to grow hemp, and then COVID-19 hit. She knew how much money and time producers had spent to grow the first hemp crop in more than 70 years. She’d been involved in the Aus- tin cannabis community for a while and was one of the first small-business owners to launch a hemp brand, 1937 Apothecary, in the capital. She says she hated to see Texas farm- ers’ efforts go unrecognized. “I was like, ‘Man, it’s almost harvest sea- son, and this sucks. I know how much they put in to make history with the first grow ever and be able to harvest, and it is COVID year, and this sucks. What a disservice,’” recalls Kerver, a president of the Texas Cannabis Council, an advocacy group that focuses on development of the Texas industry. She is also a co-founder and co-producer of the Taste of the Texas Hemp Cup. Kerver knew her limitations, though, and that she couldn’t take on this endeavor alone. She wanted to partner with someone who could get the word out and talk with the com- munity and realized that Liz Grow and Pat- rick Pope with Grow House Media were the perfect partners to create the Taste of Texas Hemp Cup, the first industry-wide event honoring Texas farmers. “It just became a whole ‘it takes a vil- lage’ thing, and it really took all of the com- munity to come together to make it happen,” Kerver says. Organizers held the first Taste of Texas Hemp Cup in December 2020 on some pri- vate land and implemented COVID safety protocols to keep everyone safe. About 300 people attend and 15 farmers submitted CBD-infused flowers for judging, followed by 30 farmers for the 2021 Taste of Texas Hemp Cup. Though only 26 submitted for this year’s cup, Kerver says they were expecting 1,500 people to attend the Dec. 10 event at The Far Out Lounge & Stage in Austin. TayCo farms didn’t come away with a win at this year’s Taste of Texas Hemp Cup. The 2022 winners were Geremy Greens’ “Lifter” for Best Hemp Flower in Texas; Errganiz’s “Pink Panther” for People’s Choice; and En- doZondo’s “Bubba Kush 59” for Best Final Presentation. Most Ripe went to Fresh Grown TX’s “Space Invader” and Most Pungent went to Clutch City Farms’ “Apple Smacks,” which also nabbed the Highest CBD award. Oak Cliff Cultivators won the Highest CBG for “Hawaiian Haze” while Tejas Hemp won Best Outdoor Grow for “Garlic Jam” and Ya- nasi Farms snagged the Best Indoor Grow for “Half-Baked.” The Best Texas Hemp Concentrate went to Snickelfritz of Gruene Leaf, a family- owned Texas cannabis boutique in New Braunfels. A checklist of qualities to consider for the Taste of Texas Hemp Cup accompanied the judges’ samples and recommends rating the farmers’ product based on presentation, taste, trichomes, aroma, pungency and consump- tion. Judge Russell Jessup, a professor from the Perennial Grass & Industrial Hemp Breeder program at Texas A&M University, has been placing his samples under the microscope to judge quality. He’s a plant breeder who’s seeking to improve hemp’s genetics to make it more uniform by improving tools to breed crops. The program is sponsored by Dallas’ Rare Earth Microeconomics, a partnership formed to accelerate hemp research and a sponsor of the Taste of Texas Hemp Cup. “We look at it for the color trichomes, If they’re clear, opaque or brown, and try to re- late to ripeness and whether it is mature or over mature,” Jessup says, referring to the tiny resin-filled glands on the surface of mari- juana flowers that can make some strains ap- pear to be coated with frost. He says hemp’s uses in industry can grow once research catches up. “Hemp and cannabis haven’t been re- searched in 70 years,” he says. “The federal government is slow, and Texas hasn’t pro- vided much support. Private industry is try- ing to get things done.” But Taylor and other Texas farmers in the industry took a hit in June when the Texas Supreme Court approved the ban on smok- able products. Kerver, who also owns Custom Botanical Dispensary, was one of those involved in the 2019 lawsuit against the Texas Department of State Health Services. She told the Austin Chronicle in August 2020 that smoking and vaping CBD-based hemp products offers faster relief to users than oral applications and that it was a huge driver of business for hemp-based companies, consisting of 50% of their revenue. The court’s ruling, Kerver says, doesn’t keep people from accessing smokable hemp, especially when Texas is surrounded by states where cannabis has been decriminal- ized at some level. “It’s they’re not as supportive, and I just think that they’re not educated enough to un- derstand the harm caused by not regulating things and not having things done right,” Kerver says. “Just saying no is like telling your teenagers not to do stupid things. You can’t just throw no out there, especially when it’s all around us.” Hemp offers far too many benefits to list, she says, yet Texas lawmakers have been “de- monizing” it. It’s another reason why she says the Taste of Texas Hemp Cup is needed. It both honors the farmers and educates the public about the benefits of smokable hemp. “It’s not going to go away,” Kerver says. “It continues to grow, and the illicit market is go- ing to continue to grow. It surrounds our bor- ders, and cannabis is coming from every direction. Texas has a huge black market. Ev- erybody around us is feeding that black mar- ket. It’s hard for people like myself who are trying to do things legally and follow the guidelines. The state isn’t helping us do ev- erything right and that is hard.” ▼ Crime Paramedic Beatdown New Details emerge Out Of secOND iNvestigatiON iNtO Dallas ParameDic whO KicKeD meNtally ill maN. by Jacob Vaughn D allas Fire-Rescue paramedic Brad Cox was fired from the department in 2021, two years after he responded to a call for a grass fire and kicked Kyle Vess, a mentally ill man, several times as the man lay on the ground. A Dallas Police Department investigation conducted at the time cleared Cox, a former professional MMA fighter, of any wrongdoing. When the media got ahold of the story and published video of the incident, Cox was fired and DPD decided to investigate again. That investigation was concluded in February, and the result was the same: no charges against Cox. But it does shed light on new details that raise doubts about some aspects of Cox’s account of that day, namely, the cause of his injuries. Some statements made as part of the second investigation seem to indicate that Cox caused injuries to himself for which Vess is still being accused some two years later. Vess was arrested for assaulting a public servant, but the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office dropped that charge last year. In 2019, Cox and DFR personnel with him that day were responding to a series of calls about grass fires being set on the side of a ser- vice road in West Dallas. When firefighters saw Vess near the fires, they suspected he was the one lighting them. Vess suffers from a mental illness similar to schizophrenia. Cox has said when he tried to approach Vess about the fires, Vess attacked him, throwing a PVC pipe at him and striking him in the face. The two tussled before Vess ended up on the ground. That’s when Cox kicked Vess several times, the former paramedic has claimed, in an attempt to defend himself. Before police officers could get Vess into cuffs, he started to sit up and Cox kicked him in the face again. DPD eventually stunned Vess with a Taser and took him into custody for assaulting a public servant. Vess was left with a broken orbital socket and si- nus and cracks in his teeth. His family also said the injuries exacerbated his mental ill- ness. Cox had some red marks on his face from the altercation. All of this was captured by police body camera footage and a nearby surveillance camera. But none of it would see the light of day until some two years later, despite pubic integrity complaints filed against Cox’s use of force. Cox was able to keep his job that whole time, likely in part because the first DPD pub- lic integrity investigation cleared him of any wrongdoing. Then, the media released the footage of Cox’s run-in with Vess. Things changed quickly from there. Cox Unfair Park from p6 John Anderson Merchandise on sale at the Taste of Texas Hemp Cup >>p10
