Who Is Georgia Hemp Dawgs?

We took a ride to South Georgia recently to visit Jimmy Hornbuckle, DBA Georgia Hemp Dawgs, LLC, at his indoor hemp grow in Valdosta. There we met with Jimmy, his lovely wife Sankie, and his oldest son Cameron. It was totally worth the 2 1/2 hour ride to get there. Enjoy some photos before we get to the story.

Jimmy and UGA

I’ve known Jimmy since 2019 when he reached out to us here at Georgia Hemp Industries regarding HB 213, The Georgia Hemp Farming Act. Lots of folks were reaching out to us during that legislative session, looking for information and interpretation that nobody really had at the time. Jimmy was different. In our discussions, he was giving me as much information as I was him. He had researched the subject thoroughly and we learned a lot from each other.
On 21 May 2019, a grad student in UGA’s hemp genetics research program also reached out to us. Here’s the body of the email, just as I received it:

“I am a researcher at the university of georgia who is starting work on hemp. We have been reaching out to groups involved with hemp in the state to see if any of them would be willing to help support the research at the university. If this is something this group is interested in please reach out to me and i can set up a conference call/ meeting where we can go over my work and see if you would be interested in supporting it to help get the local hemp production going. My work focuses on making sure Georgia farmers have all the tools to produce great hemp crops.”

Serendipity

Within a day of that email, Jimmy made his first phone call to us. As we talked, he mentioned that he’d like to throw some money at research geared toward producing hemp varietals that would do well in Georgia’s climate. How serendipitous. I put them together and a little-known fact is, Jimmy contributed $5000 to UGA’s hemp research program at the very start. Another little-known fact is that he never received any mention of it in any of the articles that were written about UGA’s hemp research. Neither would the Director of Public Affairs for the College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences acknowledge my request to use some images in publishing an article about it, past an initial “We’ll get back with you” brush-off email. I have the emails to back all this up.

Personally, I think he deserves the recognition, so “Thanks, Jimmy”!!

Meeting in Person

We finally met Jimmy in person at Pretoria Fields Brewery in Albany. Pretoria was branching out into hemp processing and put together an informational program for folks interested in growing hemp and signing up with them. Included was a good section provided by Dr. Tim Coolong from UGA.

Left to Right: Jimmy Hornbuckle, Tim Coolong, Tom McCain, Barb McCain, Val Valdepena

Why Indoors?

From our first conversation, Jimmy talked about growing indoors. He may very well have the only indoor grow in Georgia, and it is impressive. He is able to completely control the environment. He explains the process in the following video. Jimmy’s son Cameron runs the day-to-day operations at the facility. Cameron told me that up until 2019 he was a butcher, and had been for about 10 years. He said he’s a lot happier being a part of his Dad’s operation, and he is obviously proud of the products he has nurtured. Rightfully so.