SEMO students hope hemp project worth $1M prize in business competition

An entry in a worldwide entrepreneurship competition could turn into a million dollars in startup funds for a team of Southeast Missouri State University business students from Cape Girardeau.

Ethan Protzel, 22, a senior entrepreneurship business administration major, and Chance Ziegler, 23, a first-year entrepreneurship business graduate student, took first-place honors last fall in the university's first Hult Prize Challenge, qualifying them to go on to the competition's regional competition in Toronto, Canada, in April.

If they do well in Toronto, they'll have an opportunity to move on to the final phase of the competition, including six weeks of business incubator training and the potential to pitch their project at the United Nations headquarters in New York this fall.

The Hult program is the largest competition in the world for student entrepreneurs. More than 300,000 student teams from several thousand university campuses worldwide entered this year's competition, all vying for a chance to win seed money for their projects.

Established by Bertil Hult in 2010 through the Hult International Business School, the yearlong competition has been referred to as the "Nobel Prize for students," and challenges students to solve pressing social issues such as food security, water access, energy resources and climate change.

The Hult Prize is a partnership between Hult International Business School and the United Nations Foundation.

The "challenge topic" for this year's prize competition is "Bold Businesses for a Better Planet." Protzel and Ziegler, along with other teams from Southeast, presented their business concepts to a panel of judges in the fall. The judges scored the pitches on several factors related to the challenge topic.

"I was in class one day when I heard about the opportunity," Protzel said. "I told Chance about it and about the concept, which was to build a business model that was environmentally friendly and sustainable."

As for their entry, Protzel and Ziegler decided they want to change the textile industry by replacing cotton products with fiber made from hemp, which, they said, is potentially more affordable, sustainable and environmentally friendly than cotton.

"You can produce about 1,500 pounds of hemp fiber on an acre of farmland, whereas cotton only produces about 500," Protzel explained. "In addition, hemp requires little or no herbicides and very little pesticides or fertilizer. In fact, it actually fertilizes the ground itself. It grows quicker than cotton, requires less water and fewer nutrients. It's incredible."

"Hemp," Ziegler said, "has been a main fiber of choice since America's founding but it went out of favor when we had the push to criminalize cannabis as a drug. It's having a resurgence and can be the next soybean."

After winning the local competition, Protzel and Ziegler added two more members to their team -- Andrew Bell and Aaron Birk -- to prepare for the regional competitions in April.

"They're bringing some direct experience when it comes to agriculture and mechanics of operational efficiency," Ziegler said. Bell and Birk are also from Cape Girardeau.

Protzel and Ziegler have known each other for more than a decade, having first met through the Boy Scout program. Both became Eagle Scouts and both have been involved in various entrepreneurial endeavors. Although they are still students, they have formed a media consulting firm called Clairvoyant with Ziegler serving as the company's chief executive officer while Protzel is its chief operating officer.

"We are definitely entrepreneurs," Protzel said, adding the terms "entrepreneur" and "business person" are not synonymous.

"Being an entrepreneur is all about getting puzzle pieces and making them fit," he said. "In other words, finding things that work and getting them to work together."

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