Last week, Jeff Sloop told me all about his operation at Hope N Rope Farms in Orrville, where 40 acres of hemp plants will begin exploding from the soil in the next few weeks to create high-quality CBD oil to be distributed to suffering patients across the country.

Sloop is not the only farmer in Alabama to dive head-first into the state’s newest agricultural industry – more than 200 operations were recently approved by the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries (ADAI) to grow or process the plant – but he is most certainly on the forefront of a burgeoning field that will yield countless benefits to citizens and the state as a whole.

While some hemp farmers have their eyes on hemp as a tool for producing industrial commodities like wood planks, cloth, paper and the like, Sloop is committed to using his crop to create medicine for people suffering from a myriad of ailments that can be effectively treated with CBD oil.

To be fair, industrial manufacturing utilizing a previously-outlawed crop is a boon for the state and the nation – this new industry will create durable goods from an easily-grown crop, create new tax dollars and new jobs and financial resilience for small farmers – but to look at this crop and see medicine takes a bravery and industriousness that most are unwilling to see.

For, as we all know, many Americans have a problem seeing the positive possibilities beyond the profit motive and will therefore ignore the good for the chance to make more money.

While we can bloviate about increased revenues and jobs, both good and necessary things for our state and the communities that make it up, what is most important here is that Alabama farmers now have the capacity to plant and harvest a crop that can improve people’s quality of life in a way that pharmaceuticals simply cannot.

This is not debatable; it is a fact.

I began covering the fight to legalize CBD oil in the state in 2014, when I met a family whose daughter suffered from a number of debilitating ailments that required a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals.

The illnesses caused the little girl to suffer from as many as 100 seizures a day and the drugs left her lethargic and caused her teeth to fall out.

Eventually, the family moved to Oregon where CBD oil could be legally prescribed – today, that same little girl only endures a handful of seizures a week and experiences a quality of life that her parents never thought possible.

Political rumblings, like earthquakes, crop up out of nowhere and devastate indiscriminately all that is in their wake – that something as simple as whether or not to allow desperately ill people to access life-changing medication has become a political matter is disappointing and frustrating.

We have turned healthcare and agriculture into political talking points and those who could benefit from either or both are caught in the middle and left to suffer while talking heads chatter on about nothing.

I applaud Hope N Rope Farms for stepping up to help those in need and for blazing a trail toward an agriculturally-medicinal future for Alabama – one can only hope that our lawmakers won’t block the path of future progress.