Meristoga Industrial Hemp | Agricultural Commercial Film Crew Kentucky

Kentucky has always been farming country. Tobacco built generations of family farms across the state — and for decades, it held them together. But as the tobacco market contracts, Kentucky farmers are looking for the next crop that can do what tobacco once did: diversify income, sustain the land, and keep family farms in the family.

Meristoga is an industrial processor of cannabinoid-rich hemp, partnering with Kentucky farmers to grow, harvest, and process industrial hemp for downstream consumer products — oils, textiles, nutraceuticals, body care — that were previously sourced almost entirely from overseas. This video tells the story of that partnership through the voices of the farmers themselves.

We spent time on working Kentucky farms with multi-generational farming families — some tracing their roots on the same land back to 1917 — to capture what this crop means to them. Not as a business story, but as a human one. The farmers in this video aren't early adopters chasing a trend. They're pragmatists who've spent their lives reading soil and weather and markets, and they see hemp the way they've always seen a good crop: as a way to keep the farm going for the next generation.

The result is a documentary-style brand film that positions Meristoga as a genuine partner to Kentucky agriculture — not a corporation moving into farm country, but a company that shows up, checks on the crop, and earns trust the way farmers earn it: by being there.

Shot on location on working farms in Kentucky, this piece demonstrates our's ability to find the human story inside an agricultural and industrial subject and turn it into something that holds an audience.

About This Project
Client: Meristoga
Type: Brand film, documentary
Location: Rural Kentucky farms
Services: On-location production, documentary-style filming, editing

Louisville's Best Documentary and Brand Film Company

John Flower Productions has been telling Kentucky stories since 2007. From agricultural brands to corporate narratives, we find the human story inside every subject and put it on screen in a way that moves audiences and drives results.

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Video Transcript:

Everybody seems real interested in it. Just curious about it. No concerns about it. Just really wanting to know how you grow it. Brother and I growed up here on this farm.

This is a home farm. It's where Dad started, and we was by his side every day for a long time, you know? Of course, he's gone now, but this is home. Never been nowhere else. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother came here in 1917 and bought this farm, and they came from Illinois. Then my grandfather farmed, and my father and my uncle farmed, and now I farm. And hopefully at some point we'll turn it over to my kids. I guess I've been farming for 27 years because I've been married for 27 years.

My husband's been farming, I guess, his whole life. His father was a farmer. To be a farmer, you have to, you know, you have to be willing to take some risks. You never know what Mother Nature's gonna throw your way. And so we're always looking for something that, you know, if tobacco has a bad year, or if they cut tobacco out completely, or corn has a bad year, that we can fall back on something else on the farm to, to make our payments and to keep the farm going. I think hemp is, is good for the agriculture community.

It gives us some more diversity on our farms, gives us another crop that we can plant. Myself and the rest of my family, we're putting some hemp seeds in the ground.

I tell you the reason why we wanted to do it is because we think tobacco's about done, to be honest with you. It was here a long time ago and, and used a whole lot, and I think it can be used again. I really do. The whole plant can be used for so many different things. It's, it's just a wonderful, it's a wonderful opportunity.

We think it's gonna be a really good crop. There's very few times in a person's lifetime when you can get in on the ground floor of a new industry, and I feel like that's what industrial hemp is. This is a return to our roots, just the history this crop has here and the potential it has for the future. We've had a lot of people come up to us not only excited for the opportunities for their farms, but it's the opportunity of a lifetime, and once people realize that and they find their place in it it's gonna be unstoppable. Maristoga has been instrumental in, in what we've been able to do with industrial hemp. The relationship has been really good, coming out to check on the crop and us learning along the way. From day one they stepped in and got us going, and anything that we know about it, we've learned from them. Maristoga is an industrial processor of cannabinoid-rich hemp. We're partnering with farmers to buy industrial hemp crops, and we'll process those for downstream products, cannabinoid-rich oil extracts.

It'll be packaged up for wholesale distribution to people that are going to put it into new products for consumers in the United States that previously had to be purchased from overseas sources. It's textiles, it's petroleum, it's paper, it's, you know, nutraceuticals, body care. There's, there's so many avenues that you can look into and, you know, promote and be a part of something that could potentially change a lot of industries and really shift the way our country's going. I think everybody's excited. All the farmers, Oh, great, I wanna do that. We've got plenty of ground to grow it.

We've got good climate to grow it. We don't need to be buying it when we can grow it here. That's, that's the main thing. I expect a lot of people will see the successes of the last several years and view it as a real opportunity.

An American product grown by American farmers is, is a really positive thing for everyone.