May 15th, 2023
IND HEMP is pleased to announce to our employees, partners and community the addition of Eric Earnest to our leadership team as our Chief Operating Officer. Eric’s experience spans 25 years of in which he oversaw functions such as marketing, project management, and business and field operations at companies in the energy generation and distribution spaces. He helped grow a local startup company into a business with a national footprint with over $800 million in infrastructure and assets. His experience with operations in the fast-paced development and growth phase of a complex business fits right in with the current growth trajectory of IND HEMP and the hemp industry at large. His ability to wear many hats and build successful and motivated teams across departments should be a great fit.
“I’m excited to be joining the IND HEMP family at this important time. The IND Hemp team has built a solid platform to grow upon, and I look forward to working with our growers, employees, and customers to be successful and continue being a leader in the industry.” – Eric Earnest
IND HEMP, founded in 2018, started building the IH Oilseeds facility in Fort Benton in 2019. In 2020 oilseeds began operations pressing hemp seed for nutritional oil and protein as well as dehulling for hemp hearts. In 2021 IND HEMP broke ground on our fiber decortication facility and started shipping products to our customers in early 2022.
Until recently, Co-Founder and CEO Morgan Tweet oversaw operations as COO during construction and commissioning years and moved into the top executive role earlier this year to oversee all aspects of the IND HEMP businesses. This move created a great opportunity to bring in a well experienced operations officer to lead our ops and production teams as we work on increasing production capacities and efficiencies across all business units to serve our rapidly increasing product demands.
“It is a great pleasure to recognize all the hard work our IND HEMP team has done so far and the accomplishments we have achieved to be considered a lead in the industry today. It is because of this team effort that we continue to be able to recruit high-caliber candidates like Eric, who are excited and eager to jump into a fast-growing and ever-changing industry. We are excited to see his skill set and experiences complementing our team already. As a family run business, we are even more enthusiastic that his core values and passions align with the mission our company was founded on and look forward to what we can all achieve together.”
Eric is currently working on the ground with our team and will continue to be based in Fort Benton. IND HEMP is excited to welcome the Earnest family into the organization and the greater Fort Benton community, and we are grateful that they believe in our mission and company enough to make this big move.
IND HEMP is a family owned and mission driven agriculturally based company that has built industrial hemp processing plants for both oilseeds and fiber to support jobs and crop rotation opportunities in rural communities. IND HEMP is a leading USA grown supplier of hemp foods, such as hemp hearts, hemp seed oil and hemp proteins and an industrial material supplier of decorticated hemp bast fiber and hemp hurd as well as milled hemp additives. IND HEMP supplies raw materials in bulk to a multitude of industries from textiles and non-wovens to building materials, animal care, erosion control, compounding additives and many more.