As one of the top hemp processors in the South, a lot goes on within Arbor Vita8’s massive facility.

Services at Arbor Vita8 take you through the entire hemp process. From seed-to-sale, our Phenix City, Alabama site is busy every day supporting our farmers and producing extracts of the highest quality for our partners and manufacturers.

Come take a look inside and see what we’re up to.

Efficient storing

Working with a variety of partners means having the proper strategy in place to store incoming hemp biomass. Once a crop gets harvested, we can not only help transport it to our facility, but then keep it safe within our indoor storage area.

This sheer size of this space and our facility software ensures there’s no risk of crops mixing. Everything gets grouped by farmer and lot number. It’s then properly tagged, and kept separate from other incoming crops.

Careful production

Although the extraction process is very involved, our top-of-the-line machinery at Arbor Vita8 keeps your hemp as clean and pure as possible with a fully-automated process. Our hands touch your product as little as possible. 

In addition to being an efficient and sanitary system, our extractors have some of the highest through-put out there. A single machine can complete extraction up tot 5,000 pounds of hemp per day.

Milling

The first step in preparing harvested hemp for extraction is to put it through the milling process. This mills the hemp biomass into uniformed, rice sized pieces. Getting all the plant pieces into a uniform size, the crop is ready to efficiently go through processing and extraction.

Hopper

While your biomass waits for processing, it sits safely in our hopper. This machine holds the material until it’s ready to move on, and our processor pulls it from here. No human hands move your hemp from place to place.

Extractor

When your milled hemp biomass reaches the extractor, that’s where the real activity starts. The product is sprayed with -65 degree celsius ethanol. The hemp soaks and then the ethanol which now contains the cannabinoids begins to run through 

Throughout the process you’ll also see several cleaning stages. We ensure that all the ethanol, used for extraction, gets rinsed clean off the final product. By draining out the ethanol at more than one step, we’re able to guarantee a high-quality and safe final product.

This cleaning process is also enhanced by a filtration holding tank and an evaporation tank. This is where the hemp extract gets heated to ensure any remaining ethanol is separated from the CBD. All the excess ethanol is then recycled and reused.

Holding, polishing, and distilling

Once all the heavy-lifting gets done, your final product sits safely in a holding tank. From there, it will go through a final polishing stage which leaves you with CBD (or whatever cannabinoid you’re focusing on) crude oil.

Further refinement, or distillation, runs the hemp oil through an additional processing stage to increase purity and remove even more compounds from the final product. If you’ve ever bought THC-free hemp oil, you can be sure it has gone through distillation.

High-quality delivery

Now that the whole process is complete, your “hemp” goes back into storage, only as a completely different-looking product. There are no more stems and leaves, stalks and flowers. All you’ve got is hemp-derived oil waiting for the right manufacturer to turn it into the product you have been imagining. 

This completes your hemp’s journey at Arbor Vita8. We’re then happy to connect you with buyers from our vetted list of manufacturers. They’ll then take your product and transform it into one consumers buy off the shelves.

Arbor Vita8 does it all, the right way

As you can see, we’re proud of our facility at Arbor Vita8. We’ve also put a lot of energy into researching the best equipment to ensure your hemp is well-treated every step of the way. To learn more about partnering with us as a farmer or buying from us as a manufacturer, contact us today.