What doesn't kill them, will make them stronger

The hemp plant is hearty to be sure. But none of us were ready for what would happen the evening of August 9th.

Summer storms in Central Oregon are to be expected. The temperature was in the low 90’s earlier in the week. While I believed the forecast that predicted a storm, I did not believe that it would hail.
Sure enough, around 6pm, I got a call from Albert. He reported that it had begun hailing. Not just a little hail…a downpour of quarter sized hail. My heart sunk. We had been planning and working toward this goal for the better part of a year. Could it all be ruined in a matter of 5 minutes?

​I went to the farm on Saturday morning to see the destruction. 50-80% of leaves on the ground. The stems were busted and beat up. We even found a jack rabit dead in the rows. He must have got pelted too many times in the head, or drown in the flash flood. The plants did not look the same.

​So Albert and I began the day the way we began several days. With prayer. And I remembered the verse from the book of Johan (Johan 1:17) that said, “Now the LORD provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah…” So I prayed that verse over our field. That what looked like the end, would end up being a provision from God.
I know being swallowed by a big fish was not part of Jonah’s plan for the day. But it was God’s.
And while we knew all along that farming hemp came with great risk, the hail storm was not part of our plan for that day. But it was God’s.
So we put our trust in him, expecting that the hail storm was a provision for reasons we may not understand.
It has only been a week since the hail, but I can say that there is a lot of new growth, and flowers are budding. Ya, they are still pretty beat up, but this isnt the end. They look like Nate Diaz after a fight; pretty beat up, but you haven’t seen the last of them.