'Hemp-wood,' CBD manufacturing plants coming to West Ky.

Graves and Calloway counties (Wikipedia)

Far West Kentucky is shaping up to be a hemp hub, with news that a "hemp-wood" manufacturing plant and a CBD oil plant are coming to the area.

On Monday, a manufacturing plant that turns hemp into a sustainable lumber alternative opened near Murray in Calloway County. The business is the first of its kind in the nation. Greg Wilson, the CEO and founder of HempWood's parent company, Fibonacci LLC, touts the new product as eco-friendly because it causes no deforestation. And, he says, the product is 20 percent stronger than oak and can be used the same way oak wood is used, David Snow reports for The Paducah Sun. The plant is welcome news in Murray, where 600 employees of lawn mower engine manufacturer Briggs & Stratton recently found out their plant is closing in the fall of 2020.

Wilson says he got the idea from working for a bamboo flooring company years ago, according to the company website. "We're taking the plant fiber, or the stalks from a hemp plant after people have already utilized the top of the plant, and then, we are converting that using a bio-based adhesive into a wood composite," Wilson told Snow. "We're taking something that grows in six months and we're able to replicate or outperform a tropical hardwood that grows in 200 years."

"The top of the plant" is the flower buds that contain the heaviest concentration of cannabinoids, the main medically active ingredients of the cannabis plant. Just west of Murray, in the Graves County seat of Mayfield, cannabidiol manufacturer GenCanna is working on a $40 million processing facility that it says will provide more than 80 jobs. The company already owns a 120,000-square-foot facility in Paducah, says The Lane Report, a statewide business publication.

The HempWood plant will use more than $1 million a year in raw materials, all from local farms, and will pay out more than $1 million to workers annually, Wilson said. "Each one of these presses will have 12 people working on it, plus three management positions per shift per press," Wilson told Snow. "Our plan is to eventually move into the building that's being built right next door so we can have two pressing operations going, hopefully turning into two shifts per press, which means having a maximum impact approaching the 50 employee mark."