A CBD Brand Mowed This 76-Acre Art Work Into a Kansas Wheat Field

The Colorado-based company has several objectives with the current, lushest phase of its ongoing “Trust the Earth” project.

However initially, some stats on the 76- acre outdoor art setup– also known as a man-made crop circle– in McPherson, Kansas, revealed today. The work:

• Covers the equivalent of 57 football fields
• Covers more than 3 million square feet
• Dwarfs other out-of-home screens like the biggest mural (254,983 square feet) and the biggest terra firma mosaic (855,786 square feet) and could land the company in the Guinness Book of World Records

It took a lone wheat farmer one solid week of mowing, with a help from GPS and outdoor maze design firm Accuracy Mazes. Officers at Charlotte’s Web describe the task as a “aesthetically and naturally living personification” of the brand name’s objective and a method to democratize hemp.

The style comes from Shepard Fairey’s Studio Primary, which started its collaboration with Charlotte’s Web last fall for the brand’s highest-profile public interaction to date. “Trust the Earth” first appeared as a giant out-of-home screen in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, followed by activations in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

From there, the brand name introduced another “Trust the Earth” mural for Art Basel in January and a related pop-up shop in Miami, swapping out undesirable CBD items from rivals for its own.

The return of the “aggressive and blatant ‘pot leaf’ visual” is no accident, said Andrew Lincoln, associate director of incorporated marketing at Charlotte’s Web and recent speaker at Adweek’s Elevate: Marijuana occasion

” It’s indicated to turn heads and stop people in their tracks,” he said, keeping in mind that the plant in the art purposely appears like a marijuana leaf but isn’t one. “There’s still some baggage and mistaken belief about the ‘pot leaf,’ and we’re leaning into that.”

The display screen, with its roots already stitched pre-pandemic, is not a direct sales pitch, and there’s no noticeable business logo design, though the “flower of life” hemp leaf is commonly associated with the brand name.

An accompanying site, TrustTheEarth.com, asks consumers to email their legislators and motivates them to share their success stories of using CBD made from hemp, intent on constructing a community of similar people.

The business has its own heart-tugging tale based on its namesake, Charlotte Figi, who experienced an uncommon form of epilepsy. The 13- year-old Figi, whose extreme seizures were managed by CBD oil high in the compound cannabidiol but low in THC, died in April.

An overarching objective of the effort is to “ignite discussions for open access to hemp in all states that have yet to offer this choice,” said the brand name’s chief cultivation officer, Jared Stanley. (Hemp is federally legal, per the 2018 Farm Costs, but CBD made from hemp still deals with a patchwork of restrictions that differ by state.)

As part of the new work, there’s also an instructional platform, Searching for Answers, that Lincoln compares to the Netflix series Explained, where consumers can discover how to identify quality CBD and gather other essential info. It was built, in part, to attend to the spike in web searches for self-care and wellness topics throughout quarantine.

The converted wheat field “celebrates everyone on earth whose lives have actually been enhanced by hemp-derived CBD health products,” according to Charlotte’s Web CEO Deanie Elsner, and punctuates what Lincoln calls “the melting pot” of hemp fans that vary from kids and military veterans to soccer mothers and other daily folks.