Mike Tyson adds West Virginia hemp to his marijuana company

Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson is adding a hemp business to his marijuana company.

Tyson Holistic, which broke ground in January on a marijuana cultivation and processing site in southern California, says it envisions growing hemp, lavender and soy in West Virginia, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

Tyson’s company is teaming up with a West Virginia business, Almost Heaven Agriculture, and plans to covert that firm’s 350,000-square-foot greenhouse in Flemington into a growing and processing facility.

“Our first thing is to build an extraction facility to grow the hemp into money,” said Kevin Bell, Tyson Holistic’s chief operating officer. It would be West Virginia’s first hemp extraction facility.

Just four months old, Tyson Holistic already produces a hemp-infused water and a hemp infused pain-relief gel, Bell said.

The company may expand hemp operations into more states, he said, but started in West Virginia because it has cheap land and the nation’s most generous THC threshold for hemp.

West Virginia defines hemp as cannabis plants up to 1% THC, three times the limit used by most states and the federal government, 0.3%.

The 40-acre California marijuana site, called Tyson Ranch, will include 20 acres of indoor marijuana cultivation, an extraction facility and a cannabis research facility.