N.C. hemp growers brace for devastating ban
Plus: CPI Security sues opposing lawyer; Closer look at CEO pay; 'Magicians Table' review; Charlotte City Council to swear in 3 new members tonight; 'Iryna's Law' could fill Mecklenburg jail
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A new federal law would ban nearly everything made from N.C. hemp harvests, growers say; Seltzers, gummies, oils at risk
by Daniel Larlham Jr.
Seven years ago, Dana Rider saw an opportunity to build a solid future for his family by cultivating hemp. What he may not have known at that time was that he would fall in love with job.
When his family first bought their farm, just outside of Asheville, they already knew they would have animals, but there was a discussion over what exactly they would grow.
“But then they passed the farm bill in 2018, and that looked awesome,” Rider told The Ledger. “Like ‘Ahh, we get to grow hemp, and we can do this, and that.’ We didn’t even know what it looked like at the time.”
Rider partnered with local labs to manufacture gummies, oils, even CBD coffee and chocolates to sell alongside their organically grown, small batch hemp flower under their brand: Otherside Hemp.
They’ve built that brand through local shops and throughout the country, and do a lot of their business through their online store.
But language in a federal spending bill passed on Nov. 12 threatens to ban virtually all the products that Otherside Hemp sells.
Rider says that if the law takes effect toward the end of 2026 as written, things are certainly going to get rough for his family of five on the farm: “It’s like waking up one morning and everything you’ve worked hard for, for years and years, is just kinda gone.”
He says he’s hopeful legislators will change the law, but that’s uncertain. “We’re kind of staying in our lane right now. We’re just going to keep growing, keeping doing what we’re doing,” he says.
An early adopter of hemp, farmers in North Carolina have been cultivating the crop as early as 2017, thanks to a federal pilot program. More than 1,500 growers were licensed under that program, and the industry has continued to grow since the passage of the 2018 farm bill, which allowed the cultivation of the crop nationwide.
A 2023 study estimated that North Carolina ranked sixth nationally in the production of hemp-derived products, with approximately 8,800 people employed in the industry.
In North Carolina, which outlaws marijuana for recreational and medical purposes, the federal law allowing the cultivation of hemp led to a head-scratching inconsistency in which traditional marijuana was outlawed, but hemp-derived cannabis products with the same intoxicating effects as marijuana, including seltzer drinks and food items, were widely and legally available in dispensaries and even major retailers. In October, 39 attorneys general — including North Carolina’s Jeff Jackson — wrote a letter to Congress urging an end to what they called the “loophole” that allowed the sale of intoxicating hemp products.
The new law would criminalize the sale of hemp products containing more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC, a figure that hemp proponents say would cripple the industry. While the language in the bill doesn’t specifically regulate the cultivation of the crop, farmers across North Carolina are still concerned that their businesses will soon go up in smoke.
MiH Farm, owned and operated in Middlesex, east of Raleigh, by husband-and-wife duo Dave Palmer and Patricia Roberts, grows hemp inside a 1,000-square-foot grow room and uses the plant to manufacture a line of topical salves and oral remedies that incorporate the whole plant.
The crops they plant and the products they make all have less than 0.3% of total THC, Palmer said, but almost none of them have less than 0.4 milligrams of total THC. Palmer doesn’t see how any small operation like theirs would be able to survive as written.
“I mean, we could grow the plant, but we couldn’t make products from it,” Palmer said. “The 0.4 milligrams of total THC is so minimal that there may be some pet-related products that can be legal, but there’s no distinction between oral or topical. It’s all hemp products. It’s crazy.”
‘It kills the industry’
The hemp industry is largely composed of small businesses, including a wide number of family-run farms, says Rod Kight, a hemp lawyer from Asheville. As such, many farmers participate in the production and sale side of the supply chain and, in that way, would be directly impacted by the language in the bill.
But even wholesalers will be impacted by the ban, he says. Once in effect, the demand for wholesale hemp from manufacturers and retailers is likely to decline sharply.
“To be clear, the new law doesn’t change a whole lot as it relates to farming and producing hemp. But what it does do is it kills the industry to which these commodities are used,” Kight said.
Allen Pickett, founder of Honeybee Hemp Farms in Lewisville, west of Winston-Salem, is in a comparable situation to that of MiH Farm. Using the hemp he grows and the bees he raises on his two-acre farm, he produces lines of full-spectrum honey and CBD dog treats. Other than the dog treats, he says he’ll have to at the very least amend all of his recipes and drop one altogether.
What really worries Pickett, who has been working in the hemp industry since North Carolina’s pilot program, is what the law means for him as a grower and a processor, despite already thoroughly vetting the plants that he grows.
“It leaves certainly a question mark on, like, what sort of plants I would be able to grow on the front end and then how they would need to be processed or extracted,” Pickett said.
Daze and confusion
With a year until the ban goes into effect, several questions remain as to what it means for hemp farmers, including how and by whom products will be regulated at the marketing and production level. Kight says that as written, it’s assumed that somebody will be in charge of regulation.
The bill includes an exception for what’s known as “industrial hemp,” which is grown and used in manufacturing things like building materials, non-cannabinoid foods and clothing. But the demand for fiber hemp products is much lower than that of floral hemp products.
High hopes for change
What farmers, and indeed the entire industry, are hoping for are changes at the state or even federal level before the ban goes into effect.
“I think that they’re taking two ways,” Kight said of the industry’s outlook. “One is this law, if left unchanged, will kill the entire industry. So obviously, there is a significant amount of anxiety and concern about it. On the other hand, there’s some hope and optimism that something will get passed.”
Already, a bipartisan bill by Republican S.C. Congresswoman Nancy Mace has been filed that would strike the hemp-banning language.
Franny Tacy, who runs the Asheville-based dispensary chain Franny’s Farmacy, which has five N.C. locations, says that instead of prohibition, the industry needs regulation — and that the industry now needs to push for it.
“We need to fight for the plant to stay in our hands,” she said.
Daniel Larlham Jr. is a freelance writer. He can be reached at larlhamjr@gmail.com
Today’s supporting sponsor is Landon A. Dunn, attorney-at-law in Matthews:
CPI Security sues lawyer who represented ex-employee in discrimination settlement talks
CPI Security Systems has taken the rare step of suing a Charlotte lawyer who represented a former employee, saying in court documents that the lawyer engaged in unethical practices to try to pressure the security company as he was negotiating a settlement.
In a lawsuit filed last month in Mecklenburg County Superior Court, CPI says Micheal Littlejohn of Littlejohn Law PLLC sent a nine-page settlement demand letter containing false statements and confidential personnel information about CPI employees, not just to CPI’s attorney but to a general human resources email box, which was able to be accessed by multiple CPI employees. Sending the confidential information to unconnected CPI employees caused “employee confusion, disruption of day-to-day operations and harm to internal morale,” the lawsuit states.
CPI says the move violates North Carolina’s rules of professional conduct, which call for lawyers not to communicate about cases with people known to be represented by other lawyers.
The suit says CPI filed a grievance against Littlejohn with the State Bar, a regulatory body for lawyers that can discipline attorneys accused of unethical practices. The suit also accuses Littlejohn of attempting to negotiate a waiver to prevent himself from being sued by CPI as part of the settlement agreement, against the wishes of his client, which cost CPI additional legal expenses.
Littlejohn was representing a CPI employee who was fired in August, the suit says, after the company determined that she accessed confidential employee information unrelated to her job and then submitted prompts with the information to ChatGPT, which is against company policies. The woman had said she was underpaid because she was Black and was fired because she brought that discrimination to light.
CPI had offered her a “generous severance agreement” because it understood that the employee “may have some personal needs and [wanted] to avoid the time and cost associated with a potential dispute,” the suit says. The two sides reached an agreement in October.
Littlejohn has represented plaintiffs in some local high-profile cases, including the families of inmates who died in the Mecklenburg County Jail and the families of suspects who died in police custody.
CPI’s CEO, Ken Gill, serves on the board of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Foundation, which supports programs that help police officers and improve public safety.
The suit seeks at least $75,000 plus punitive damages for what CPI says is libel and interference with business contracts.
CPI declined to comment on the suit. Littlejohn referred questions to his attorney, Nick Ellis of Poyner Spruill, who said in an email: “We look forward to defending the claims made against Mr. Littlejohn and are confident his actions in representing his client, a former employee of CPI, did not damage CPI in any of the ways it claims in its lawsuit.” —Tony Mecia
[Article edited 12/1/25 to incorporate statement from Littlejohn’s lawyer]
➡️ Read the CPI lawsuit against the lawyer
How does Gene Woods’ annual compensation stack up against the pay of other Charlotte CEOs?
News last week of the $25.8M compensation package paid by Atrium Health’s parent company to CEO Gene Woods raised some eyebrows. It sounds like a lot, right?
But is it? Context is important. We pointed out last week that Atrium’s parent company, Advocate Health, is now the country’s third-largest health system, with $35B in annual revenues and about 162,000 employees. (Advocate said in a statement that executive pay “reflects the scale and complexity of guiding one of the nation’s largest health systems” and is tied to certain performance metrics such as patient safety and community impact.)
We wondered how Woods’ 2024 pay, which was 49% more than last year and four times his pay from 2017, compares with the money paid to CEOs of other big and well-known companies with strong Charlotte ties.
The good news for those of us with curious minds is that those figures are publicly available for CEOs of publicly traded companies.
The Ledger pulled together the 2024 total compensation of CEOs of well-known public companies with a Charlotte presence — firms that are either based in the Charlotte region or are based elsewhere and have a large employee base here.
Comparing the compensation packages of CEOs of for-profit businesses with those of nonprofits like Advocate Health isn’t entirely apples-to-apples, as pay for company executives often consists mainly of company stock that isn’t actual cash at the time it is given, while nonprofits don’t have stock to issue and tend to have compensation consisting mostly of salary and bonuses. And because nonprofits receive tax breaks and are expected to provide community benefits, the IRS requires their executive pay to be “reasonable.”
Below, we’ve listed the CEOs of major Charlotte companies, with their 2024 total compensation, the percentage change from 2023, and the number of company employees — all drawn from regulatory filings.
The Ledger found that Woods’ compensation is higher than the CEOs of all major Charlotte companies we examined, except Bank of America and Wells Fargo, which have more employees and several times more revenue than Advocate Health. But most Charlotte companies, which pay their CEOs less, have far fewer employees and less revenue than Advocate Health.
Here are the details:
CEO name, company, 2024 compensation, % change compared with 2023 + number of company employees
Charles Scharf, Wells Fargo, $30.3M, +17% — 217,000 employees
Brian Moynihan, Bank of America , $28.7M, +1% — 213,000 employees
Lynn Good, Duke Energy, $21.3M, +4% — 26,400 employees
Marvin Ellison, Lowe’s Cos., $20.2M, +11% — 161,000 employees
Charles Treadway, CommScope, $20.1M, +63% — 20,000 employees
Leon Topalian, Nucor, $19M, -15% — 33,000 employees
J. Frank Harrison III, Coke Consolidated, $19M, -4% — 17,000 employees
Vimal Kapur, Honeywell, $18.3M, +27% — 102,000 employees
Robert Isom, American Airlines, $15.6M, -50% — 133,300 employees
J. Kent Masters Jr., Albemarle Corp., $14.4M, -1% — 8,300 employees
William Rogers, Truist, $14M, +12% — 38,300 employees
Eric Steigerwalt, Brighthouse Financial, $10.1M, +1% — 1,400 employees
David Smith, Sonic Automotive, $9.9M, +32% — 10,700 employees
Eugene Lowe, SPX Corp., $9.3M, +22% — 4,300 employees
Jonathan Fitzpatrick, Driven Brands, $7.7M, -74% — 10,700 employees
Michael Praeger, AvidXchange, $7.7M, +6% — 1,600 employees
William Christensen, Jeld-Wen, $5.8M, +1% — 16,000 employees
Doug Lebda, LendingTree, $4.7M, +283% — 900 employees
John Cato, Cato Corp., $2.4M, -18% — 7,000 employees
As these are 2024 figures, some of these CEOs are no longer on the job. Public companies typically file regulatory forms listing executive pay every March or April. —Tony Mecia
Related Ledger article:
“Gene Woods’ 2024 compensation surges to $25.8M” (Nov. 26)
Review: ‘The Magicians Table’ delivers a fast-paced, immersive night of close-up illusions, playful misdirection and rotating performers
Arts critic Lawrence Toppman checked out “The Magicians Table” last month at Blume Studios — and quickly discovered that the real trick is how fast the evening makes skepticism disappear.
In a review for The Ledger, he wrote:
You can approach a magic show in two ways. You can be a skeptic, analyzing illusions until you learn (or think you have learned) the planning behind them. Or you can be a fan who marvels at misdirection, laughs at clever patter and consistently goes “ooooh” with childlike wonder.
I’m both. So I thoroughly enjoyed this snappy, two-hour whirlwind, which occasionally yielded up its secrets when I had time to think — which I seldom did. …
“Magicians Table” works like speed dating, with a team of 10 illusionists rotating among 12 tables for perhaps six or seven minutes each. Cups, dice, photographs, coins and especially cards appear and vanish, fly through the air, go in and out of clenched fists. One artist provided my favorite kind of ending to a magic routine: He pretended a trick had not quite worked perfectly, then set up a twist ending to show that it had.
The show runs through Feb. 15. Read the full review:
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Coming later today: The Ledger’s annual charity shout-out
Tomorrow is Giving Tuesday, an annual day of giving in which people are encouraged to support nonprofits, charities and community organizations.
We asked our community of paying members to recommend their favorites, and we’re sharing them with you in a special edition later today so you can learn about local organizations that might be worthy of your support.
You might be interested in these Charlotte events
Events submitted by readers to The Ledger’s events board:
WEDNESDAY: “Winter Holiday Luncheon,” 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., at Maggiano’s Little Italy, SouthPark, 4400 Sharon Road. Join Senior Scholars at Queens members for a delicious holiday luncheon and a chance to hear from guest speaker Tony Mecia, Founder and Executive Editor of The Charlotte Ledger. Hear Tony’s thoughts on what’s ahead for Charlotte in 2026 as you feast on chopped salad, fettuccine alfredo and tiramisu. $50/person.
WEDNESDAY: “‘Hundreds of Beavers’: A Northwoods Christmas!,” 7:30-9:30 p.m., at Independent Picture House, 4237 Raleigh St. Before 2025 ends, here’s one more chance to experience the hit 2024 DIY film “Hundreds of Beavers” in a cinema with fans! And yes, the film is 100% a Christmas film! So come celebrate the end of 2025 and see the film on the BIG SCREEN, with an audience, for the first or 50th time! $12.85/ticket.
WEDNESDAY: “Social Series: Drink Charms,” 5-7 p.m., at Wiloe Home and Gift, 1520 Lyon Court. Suitable for those who love jewelry, décor and fun knick-knacks, learn how to create your own drink charms while enjoying the curated home goods at Wiloe Home and Gift. In this workshop presented by Arts+, you will be introduced to basic jewelry tools and techniques and be able to design with a large assortment of beads and charms. $18/person.
SATURDAY: “Building Bundles of Joy,” 9-11 a.m., at Myers Park Country Club, 2415 Roswell Ave. A festive workshop is coming to town! Earn your “Elf Status” as an official Baby Bundle builder, spreading cheer and bundling joy for babies in need. Don your cozy pajamas for a festive morning of activities, breakfast treats and giving back this holiday season. $50/ticket. Children under 2 are free.
➡️ List your event on the Ledger events board.
In brief:
New City Council: Three new Charlotte City Council members will be sworn in tonight: Joi Mayo in District 3, representing the westside; J.D. Mazuera Arias in District 5, representing east Charlotte; and Kimberly Owens in District 6, representing south Charlotte. Democrats will have a 10-1 advantage on the council over Republicans.
Election filings begin: Candidate filing for the 2026 election starts today at noon. A variety of federal, state and local offices will be on the ballot in a March primary and November general election.
ACC football championship set: Duke will play Virginia in the ACC Championship Game at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte at 8 p.m. on Saturday. UVa opened as a 2.5-point favorite.
More arrests, fuller jail anticipated: Mecklenburg leaders are predicting more arrests, a larger jail population and added strain on law enforcement as “Iryna’s Law” takes effect today. It tightens pretrial release rules by expanding violent-offense categories and requiring judges to review each defendant’s full criminal history before release. (WFAE)
Charlotte could host games of 2031 Women’s World Cup: Charlotte has been named as a proposed host city in U.S. Soccer’s bid for the 2031 FIFA Women’s World Cup, positioning Bank of America Stadium for potential matches if the expected U.S.-Mexico–Costa Rica–Jamaica joint bid is approved. (WSOC)
Supporting east Charlotte businesses: Local nonprofit CharlotteEAST has launched a monthlong “Fuerza del Este” campaign that offers shoppers bonus gift cards — $50 for spending $25 and $100 for spending $50 — to help Eastland-area shops recover from steep revenue losses following the recent Border Patrol operations. (WSOC)
Corrections
An article last week on the 2024 compensation package of Gene Woods, CEO of Atrium Health’s parent company, misstated the date that the company’s nonprofit tax form was due. It was due Nov. 17 (not Nov. 15).
An article last week on the city of Charlotte’s efforts to encourage the construction of accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, misstated the date that the city adopted the Unified Development Ordinance. The City Council passed the ordinance in 2022, and it took effect in June 2023.
Loves me some internet: Could it really be the Panthers’ year?
A meme that surfaced on the internet in the spring predicting the Carolina Panthers could make the Super Bowl took on new life on Sunday, with the Panthers’ surprise win against one of the top teams in the league, the Los Angeles Rams.
The meme points out that in the year before the Panthers made it to the 2004 and 2016 Super Bowls, Ohio State won the national football championship, the Panthers opened the season against the Jacksonville Jaguars and J-Lo filed for divorce. The planets seem to be aligning again…
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I find it interesting that The Ledger has now joined the rest of the media sources I have read in exploring the new hemp restriction law by focusing solely on the implications for small business owners (hemp/cannabis farmers and retailers) in the industry.
There are no interviews with those responsible for introducing the legislation or even with those who might offer reasons for supporting the law. I’m sure those folks would be equally available.
I can’t help but wonder if similar legislation were passed, affecting the adult only retailers and entertainment venues, would the coverage be similar?