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TM
Volume 29 | Number 4
Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service
July | August 2021
Farmers find CBD hemp industry’s first years rocky, but hang onto hope for future By FL Morris
Certified organic CBD hemp grows really well in our region—you could almost say it grows like a weed. Since the 2018 Federal Farm Bill allowed the production and distribution of hemp products with a limit of 0.3% THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) for the first time in more than 50 years, the marketplace has exploded, but not to the benefit of farmers. After the farm bill was signed at the end of 2018, there was a year of absolute frenzy in Wisconsin, where I live and farm. This sudden change in federal law was accompanied by big risks taken by bold entrepreneurs, including Midwestern organic farmers. Throughout the growing season of 2019, I witnessed long-time and would-be farmers of all kinds assembling in Wisconsin and Northern Illinois by the hundreds. The atmosphere was always rich with questions, ranging from topics of hemp production, post-harvest handling, processing, products, marketing and sales, regulation, organic certification, and how the plant affects the human and animal body. The answers were less common. Now it’s the summer of 2021 and what has unfolded in the country, specifically in the Wisconsin hemp industry, is disappointing to many small farmers and start-up businesses, but also all too predictable. Farmers are officially getting pennies on the dollar while many manufacturers, distributors, and retailers enjoy handsome profits. Sound familiar? One could say the hemp industry’s story has taken a similar path as that of the dairy industry, except that the many decades of poor policy, greedy corporate behavior, and removal of farm subsidies has been compressed into 18 months.
FL Morris inspects hemp plants growing at Grassroots Farm near Monroe, Wisconsin, in August 2020, a month before harvest. She markets her crop through the South Central Wisconsin Hemp Cooperative, which she heads.
Photo by Rebecca Jaworski
Despite exactly when you jumped into the hemp industry, where, and what size you are now, very few CBD producers and companies have not been affected by the sudden oversupply of raw product and drop in prices almost immediately after the rise of COVID-19. Consumers may have seen retail prices slide a bit, but prices have remained high enough for many folks to stick with their affordable and effective ibuprofen,
valerian tincture, and arnica for relief from various ailments that CBD is also known to address. In short, some in the supply chain are raking in the cash, while some others (farmers) are losing money to offload a slowly degrading raw product. “I started growing CBD hemp in 2018, the first year it was legal to do so in Wisconsin,” said Kattia Jimenez Growing CBD Hemp continues on 6
New project helps fiber hemp growers, researchers share production data By Phillip Alberti
PO Box 339, Spring Valley, WI 54767
The Hemp Farming Act of 2018 legalized hemp production (grain, fiber, and cannabinoids) in the United States. Despite the initial promise of sure-fire profitability, the hemp industry and its growers have had significant growing pains. Many growers learned tough lessons growing hemp, given the challenges associated with producing this crop. More akin to a vegetable crop, hemp often requires significant input costs to take the crop successfully to harvest, infrastructure to process it properly, and connections to turn it into a sellable product. Unfortunately, there
wasn’t (and currently still isn’t) a definitive or reliable “how-to” guide for growing hemp in the Midwest. Principle among the many questions facing new hemp growers is the issue of what cultivars to grow based on environmental factors, regulations, production goals, and potential market outlets. University-published resources for cultivar performance and best management practices for producers in the Midwest had not been developed due to prior federal regulation. Specifically, recommendations for planting methods, fertility requirements, rotational impacts, and cultivar selection, among others, were non-existent. Additionally, many of the resources developed for hemp production are coming from states with vastly different growing conditions than those in this part of the country. Cultivar recommendations and production strategies developed in more experienced hemp growing states (Colorado, Oregon, and California, for example) do not always perform well in the conditions experienced by Midwestern growers. However, a new project is beginning to fill some of those knowledge and production gaps across the region. In 2020, a collaborative effort consisting of researchers, grower-cooperators, and private laboratories was formed to better understand production methods being used in addition to the relative performance of hemp cultivars. In short, participation in this program provided hemp growers an exciting opportunity to receive discounted cannabinoid analysis in exchange for data collection and data sharing. The data from these efforts was fed into an online website known as the Midwestern Hemp Database (MHD). Built with the intent to provide future growers and regulators a reliable resource when making
production decisions, this information was deposited into a publicly available and interactive data visualization tool. Collaborators included university researchers (University of Illinois Extension, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michigan State University Extension, and Purdue University) and private laboratories (Rock River Laboratory, Pride Analytics on Consulting, and ACT Laboratories).
Citizen Science Despite having a year (in some cases, two) of production under their belt, growers and researchers simply did not have resources to determine what was or was not working in the region. In many cases, growers and researchers have foundational data to build off, but that was not available at the time. Knowing that so many growers were going to be doing this production regardless of what data they had in front of them, the MHD team wanted to use their expertise, their skill, and learn from them as well. By combining university research protocols with crowdsourcing of grower-collected data, this project pulled in a large amount of information in a short period of time. The MHD reveals common agronomic practices throughout the region, as well as how different hemp cultivars performed in terms of flower development, cannabinoid content, and overall yields. In its first year of operation, 130 growers participated in the research effort, providing over 750 sample submissions; the data interface is updated weekly throughout critical sample submission and flowering periods. A report summarizing the 2020 growing season findings and associated project details are all available at the project website, go.illinois.edu/HempDatabase. Hemp Database continues on 8