“The first thing a lot of people ask me is ‘can you smoke it?’” laughs HempWood founder Gregory Wilson. But he doesn’t have any interest in farming the cannabis sativa plant as a commercial intoxicant. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite reason he started working with hemp.
Wilson lives on a 171-acre organic farm in Murray, KY, growing hemp, mushrooms, berries, garlic and more while raising cows, chickens and pigs. He cares about where his food comes from and what goes into his body—and he thinks the same level of caution and care should factor into what goes into your home and its building materials.
He spent 14 years in China engineering wood flooring from bamboo—a process that uses formaldehyde to bind the filaments together. “I’ve got all sorts of health problems because of that,” he says.
Wilson, who’s an inventor as much as he’s an entrepreneur, was perfectly positioned to make use of hemp as a wood flooring product when the plant became legal. The process he developed for HempWood uses a soy-based adhesive which didn’t work as well with bamboo—a plant with a waxy, oily outer layer.
building block. “We’re still the new kid on the block,” Wilson says of his company. “Only six percent of America has ever heard of HempWood.
When hemp became legal in 2018, he filed some patents on it and moved to the small city of Murray in an area of the Bluegrass State that historically yielded plentiful hemp crops dating back to pioneer days, until it was banned in 1970. It was there that he launched HempWood and built a product that would be awarded “Coolest Thing Made in Kentucky” in 2024 by the Kentucky Association of Manufacturers: a carbon-negative, zero-waste, zero-VOC (volatile organic compound) hemp lumber and flooring product that’s both beautiful and of high quality.
HempWood grows their own hemp—approximately 300-400 acres annually, and also sources from other local hemp farms. Once harvested, the hemp stalks are turned into lumber and any hemp waste is recycled as a heat source for production.
In August 2025, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) performed the ceremonial “board-cutting” to celebrate the company’s addition of a second factory on the Murray campus—one for the creation, sawing and drying of HempWood (the block mill, 16,450 sq. ft.) and one for transforming the wood into flooring, panels, tables and custom mill work (the flooring mill, 12,840 sq. ft.). Even so, HempWood is only at the beginning of its story. “We’re still the new kid on the block,” Wilson says. “Only about six percent of America has ever heard of HempWood.” But for Wilson, who first developed a successful hemp wood material in 2010, it feels like forever.
The HempWood product has a lot going for it. It’s healthy, sustainable, eco-friendly, US-made, 20 percent stronger than hickory, is billed as a “100-year floor” and costs about the same as domestic lumber to manufacture. Yet it faces unique
