Budz Butter: An Entrepreneurial (Ad)venture into the World of CBD

As Levi Budz looked over his healthy crop of 750 hemp plants, he couldn’t help but reflect on how much had changed since last spring, when he planted his first crop of hemp—3,500 plants! After a successful foray into hemp farming in 2019, he had planned to double the number of plants to 7,000; however, after the bottom dropped out of the market for CBD hemp biomass, Levi decided to scale back his planting significantly in 2020. On the other hand, the market for his CBD products was growing steadily. In 2017, when he started Budz Butter, Levi never planned to backward integrate into growing his own hemp, but the opportunity to do so presented itself, and he decided to go for it. Then again, in 2017, Levi was not planning to infuse food products with CBD; he started Budz Butter in Colorado, and the plan was to create branded food products that were infused with THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the psychoactive compound found in cannabis.