The Rise of ‘Red State Weed’ and What to Do About It
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
Release Date: 02/21/2024
Bear Fiber Weaves American Textiles with Hemp
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
On this week’s Hemp Podcast, we talk to Guy Carpenter, founder of Bear Fiber in North Carolina, where he is spinning a blend of hemp and cotton into yarn and making garments like hats, shirts, and socks. “The vision was to incorporate sustainability and longevity into people’s lifestyle,” he said. Bear Fiber developed proprietary methods to produce cottonized hemp fiber, and is making connections around the U.S. and the world to reestablish hemp as a primary “source of natural fibers for better products,” he said. When mixed with other fibers, such as cotton, hemp brings added...
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Industrial Hemp on the National Mall
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
Apologies to Jimmy Stewart. I only went to Washington for one day. I took the train from Philadelphia May 6 to record a podcast episode at the Ag on the Mall event on the National Mall in D.C. The National Hemp Association and the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council invited me to spend time at their display. They had a tent set up with tables full of products made from hemp: cat litter, animal bedding, shirts, rope, bio-plastics socks, flooring and biofuels. They even had a regular old 5-gallon bucket made from hemp. Next to the tent was The FiberCut, a four-tiered, adjustable-height sickle-bar...
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Hempcrete Workshop Lays Foundation to Build Industry and Community
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
This week’s podcast takes us to a hempcrete workshop in Barto, Pennsylvania. That’s where Cameron McIntosh of Americhanvre Cast-Hemp hosted a four-day hands-on training session to teach the basics of the spray-applied method of hempcrete installation using the Ereasy system. Training began Saturday morning at McIntosh’s shop at a farm in Berks County. With a total of 14 participants and four assistant instructors, he said, “this is our single biggest training.” Attendees traveled from around the country and the world, including Texas, North Carolina, Minnesota, California, and...
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Exploring Hemp Fiber Agronomy and Genetics
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
On this week’s hemp podcast, we listen to a panel discussion from the NoCo Hemp Expo that took place in Colorado earlier this month. The panelists were Rachel Berry, a farmer and founder of the Illinois Hemp Growers Association; Terry Moran, a sales rep from Kanda Hemp, an importer of Asian hemp varieties; Corbett Miteff from KonopiUS, an importer of European hemp genetics; and Larry Smart, a geneticist and plant breeder from Cornell University. The panel discussion was moderated by Eric Singular who described the topic of discussion as “the intersection of agronomy and genetics in hemp...
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420 Special: Rumble Strip – John Rodgers Weed Farmer
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
On this 420 Bonus show, we share an episode of one of our favorite podcasts, . It’s made by Erica Heilman who tells stories of rural Vermont. On this episode she interviews Vermonter John Rodgers, a stonemason the Northeast Kingdom, where he also runs a construction business, plows driveways and rents properties, and for sixteen years he served in the Vermont Legislature in both the House and the Senate. He works all the time so he can hold onto the farm that's been in his family for 200 years. It was a dairy when he was growing up there. Now he's growing weed for Vermont retailers. Thank...
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10th Annual NoCo Hemp Expo Gathers Many Voices
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
This week’s hemp podcast is a recap of the 10th annual in Estes Park, Colorado, April 11-13, where industry stakeholders gathered to collaborate, commiserate and celebrate the state of hemp in 2024. The episode features voices from many attendees, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. “We’re really all hands on deck to make sure Colorado continues to be an ag powerhouse, and hemp is a big part of that,” Polis said. State Ag Commissioner Kate Greenberg agreed with the governor and said the “conversation is really just diversified in what hemp is capable of.” Hemp...
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Experimental Hemp Micro Processing With Steve Groff
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
On this week’s hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming talks to Steve Groff from in Holtwood, Lancaster County, where he is getting ready to plant 70 acres of industrial hemp. “This year it’s all fiber. And we’ll probably plant about 10 varieties,” Groff said. Of those 10, about a third will be what he calls his “core varieties“ that have performed well previously on his farm or in the Mid-Atlantic region in general. “We are going to be testing several other newer varieties that might perform well, that we need to basically, I’ll say, ground-truth and see how they work,” he said....
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Eyes on the Prize: The Somewhat Messy Process of Getting Hemp Grain into the Feed Markets
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
On this bonus episode we talk to Andrew Bish and Morgan Tweet from the Hemp Feed Coalition, the advocacy group that has been working for four years to get hemp grain approved as a livestock feed. Opening up the feed markets is the one of the most important issues in the hemp industry today. Hemp grain was given tentative approval by AAFCO in January, with a final vote in August. On this episode the HFC folks respond to a recent blog post published by Agriculture Policy Solutions, another advocacy group with deep ties to the hemp industry, a blog post which at best confuses the issue and at...
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The Bee’s Knees: Ken Meyer on the Buzz About Hemp in South Dakota
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
In this week’s hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming speaks with Ken Meyer, beekeeper and hemp processor from South Dakota. Meyer and his family run a fourth-generation beekeeping business as well as the state’s first industrial hemp processing facility. As a young man, Meyer enjoyed beekeeping but was encouraged by his elders to get an education instead of going into the family business, which he did, and he had a fruitful career as lawyer. In 2013, his dad and brother successfully recruited him back into the family business of keeping bees, and today he oversees the beeswax rendering facility...
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Right Coast Hemp Hosts Hempcrete Workshops in New Jersey
Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast
On this bonus episode of the Hemp Podcast, we talk to Mike Mercadante from Right Coast Hemp in Manahawkin, New Jersey, where the company is holding the first of a series of hands-on hempcrete work shops, May 10-12. The workshops are intended to give local builders and contractors a chance to get to know hemp as a material and see how the hempcrete process works. Learn more about Right Coast Hemp Learn more about Hearts of Mercy Register for the workshop May 10-12 Thanks to our sponsors: IND HEMP Americhanvre National Hemp Association Forever Green King's Agriseeds Pennsylvania Hemp Industry...
info_outlineThis week’s podcast guest is Robert Hoban, a cannabis attorney and industry leader.
Hoban recently published a five-part series at Forbes.com in which he takes a deep dive on some of the most controversial issues in the hemp industry today.
Hoban has had a full-spectrum cannabis career, having worked extensively on both sides of the marijuana/hemp divide.
A few years before the 2014 Farm Bill opened a legal pathway for hemp in the U.S., Hoban was approached by a company that wanted to sell CBD, which at the time was a relatively unknown substance.
“I was asked a very direct question,” he said. “Is CBD legal under the Controlled Substances Act?”
He was only vaguely familiar with CBD at the time, and so he didn’t know the answer.
“I said, ‘Give me three weeks. I’m going to do the deepest dive I could possibly do,’ and I did,” he said.
The legal opinion he wrote based on his analysis was widely shared and ultimately was a contributing factor to the meteoric rise of CBD.
“Based on the definition of marihuana, spelled with an H under our Controlled Substances Act, it was quite clear to me that certain elements of the plant, and certain variations of the plant grown internationally, were indeed lawful under our Controlled Substances Act,” he said.
“And CBD is not and was never a scheduled substance.”
It’s not hard to draw a line between the overproduction of CBD after the 2018 Farm Bill and the recent market explosion of substances like Delta-8 THC or THC-0.
“Because of all this biomass, the lack of FDA action, and good ole American entrepreneurialism, we saw the rise of intoxicating hemp derivatives,” Hoban writes in his Forbes article.
Hoban refers to the derivatives, or IHDs, as “red state weed” because “much of this hemp derivative activity has become popular in so-called red states,” Hoban writes, where as Democratic-majority blue states are more likely to have avenues for legal marijuana through medical dispensaries or recreational shops.
Red state weed has created headaches for lawmakers who are trying to figure out the best way to deal these substances. Should they be regulated? Should they be banned?
Because Hoban has worked closely with both the hemp industry and the marijuana industry, he has watched with concern as these two sectors of the larger cannabis industry go to war over these derivatives.
“When I started to see the finger pointing back and forth, I just wanted to shed some light on what was happening and bring some perspective to it,” he said.
“And this was on the heels of fighting a policy battle in the state of Colorado, where the marijuana sector was very deliberate in its intention to shut this sector down.”
Some argue that the rise of IHDs was due to a loophole in the language of the Farm Bill. But Hoban said this is no loophole and the cannabis industry as a whole should be embracing these substances, not trying to ban them.
The demand for these products does not go away simply because a state government bans them. It only makes consumer safety an issue, Hoban said.
Read Robert Hogan's articles on Forbes.com
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthoban/
News Nuggets
Hemp sampling protocol changed in Pennsylvania
https://www.farmprogress.com/hemp/hemp-sampling-protocol-changed-in-pennsylvania
Oklahoma's industrial hemp potential: Unveiling benefits and new task force formation
Advocates celebrate inclusion of hemp in USDA’s Census of Agriculture
https://mjbizdaily.com/advocates-celebrate-inclusion-of-hemp-in-usda-census-of-agriculture/
‘It’s almost carbon-negative’: how hemp became a surprise building material
Thanks to our Sponsors!
IND HEMP
Mpactful Ventures
https://www.mpactfulventures.org/
Forever Green, distributors of the KP-4 Hemp Cutter
https://www.hempcutter.com/