Loosen up the weight that’s been on your shoulders.” They want to help you get through all the stuff that’s been on you. As long as you show up for work, they want to help you succeed. "They don’t hold your past against you, they’re only worried about what you can do for yourself and what you can do for the company. "Appalachian Botanical is a really great company," he continues. I started using drugs and I caught a charge in 2014 which put me into a drug court program." I’ve been in and out of jail since I was about 12 years old. So I just hung out with friends, started working construction around 14 or 15 years old, and I made bad decisions on bad decisions. There’s not a whole lot of jobs around here so there was nothing really looking forward or bright. There’s not too much to do other than get in trouble.
“I’m from a small town here in Boone county," he says. So helping them come back from the problems they’ve experienced so they can be productive members of society, that's an extremely attractive proposition to me.”Īdam, a crew lead at the company, is a formerly incarcerated resident of Boone County who is especially grateful for the opportunity he’s been given at Appalachian Botanical. “While maybe they’ve made some bad decisions in life, it’s not entirely their fault they were born into poverty or born into an area where the jobs are few and far between. “One of the reasons that this business has been so important to me is there are people out there who need second chances,” Sheppard says. is letting Appalachian Botanical do the reclamation work faster and cheaper.īut the second lease on life isn't for the land alone. So instead of having to plant trees, which take many years to be deemed productive, Penn Virginia Operating Co. It's a godsend for the mining company, which is only able to reclaim the bond they have on the site when the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection decides the land has been restored and is productive. Without any competition, she pays just a nominal annual rent as well as royalties based on gross sales. Sheppard acquired a 15-year agricultural lease from the Penn Virginia Operating Company, the landowner of an old strip mine. Fortunately, there is one beautiful purple plant that is even tougher than the rocky terrain. But as the world pivoted to natural gas, those coal mines were no longer financially feasible to operate, so the mining companies walked away, leaving leaving acres of pitted hillsides and valleys behind. The Boone County area was once a busy hub for strip mines. It’s a venture of second chances in more than one way. Her new company, Appalachian Botanical, is now a 35-acre lavender farm and apiary located in the bowl of an old strip mine. This year, Sheppard’s notion became a reality in Boone County, W.Va.
“I was hired to write a grant to explore the feasibility of growing lavender on reclaimed coal mine land,” Sheppard recalls, “When the grant was winding down, I had the idea that this would be great as a commercial opportunity.” But something came up at work that pulled her into a completely different world. For more than a decade, she was the founding partner of a consulting firm that did market research, business planning and grant writing for tech startups and nonprofits. Jocelyn Sheppard hasn’t always been a lavender and honey farmer.
0 kommentar(er)
