Stacking Up with Renewabuild Great Plains
Industrial Hemp Podcast
This week on the show we talk with Ken Meyer of Complete Hemp Processing in Winfred, South Dakota. As of last week, Meyer is also a co-founder of Renewabuild Great Plains — the first U.S.-licensed manufacturer of structural hempcrete blocks. We've been telling the story of these structural blocks for a long time on the podcast. We back in 2019 — they look like giant Lego blocks and work much the same way — at the Pennsylvania Farm Show, where the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council had them on display. Back then, the blocks were made by a Canadian company called Just BioFiber...
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Steve Groff and the Great Wall of Hemp
Industrial Hemp Podcast
HOLTWOOD, Pa. — This week on the Hemp Podcast we take a short road trip to southern Lancaster County to catch up with farmer Steve Groff. "What we're looking at here, Eric, is a metaphor for the hemp industry. We're looking broken promises and contracts that didn't come to be," Groff said, leaning against a stack of round bales of hemp at his farm in Holtwood. Twelve hundred round bales. Four bales wide. Three bales high. It extends into the field for about two tenths of a mile. It’s covered in black tarps and you can see it from the road. You can probably see it from space too. Steve...
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Getting From HempToday to Hemp Tomorrow with Kehrt Reyher
Industrial Hemp Podcast
This week on the Hemp Show, we talk to Kehrt Reyher, CEO and publisher of HempToday, a leading source of global hemp news. An American expat from Indiana who has lived in Poland for more than 30 years, Reyher cut his teeth in journalism at U.S. newspapers like the Providence Journal and USA Today before moving overseas and launching a successful media company in Warsaw. Since founding HempToday in 2015, he has become a trusted voice covering industrial hemp policy, international markets, CBD regulation and the ongoing fight to define what “true hemp” really means. In this episode, we dig...
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Maciej Kowalski: Be Your Own Supply Chain
Industrial Hemp Podcast
This week on the Hemp Show we talk to Maciej Kowalski, founder and CEO of Kombinat Konopni, a hemp company in Northern Poland. We hear how he built a vertically integrated company — from planting, harvesting, processing, all the way to manufacturing finished goods — and why he would rather control the system rather than rely on supply chains that don’t fully exist. “Everyone is saying about the need to build a supply chain. Yeah, that’s one approach. The other is be your own supply chain,” Kowaski said. His pragmatism is often guided by a healthy skepticism. “If you have a dozen...
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Dakota Hemp: Building an Industry in South Dakota
Industrial Hemp Podcast
This week on the Hemp Show, we’re talking to the guys from Dakota Hemp in Wakonda, South Dakota. John Peterson and Karll Lecher are running a HempTrain decortication system, taking in bales from local farmers and turning them into fiber and hurd. We get into how the facility works, what they’re producing, and what it takes to actually run a processing plant in the Midwest. We talk about how they brought farmers in, what those early meetings looked like, and how the conversation has shifted over time — from skepticism to real agronomic questions. Once farmers got over the novelty of hemp,...
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Pushing Progress in the DC Swamp
Industrial Hemp Podcast
On this week’s hemp show, we talk to a couple of hemp policy advocates who recently traveled to the swamps of D.C. in hopes of affecting change. This week we’re joined by Geoff Whaling, chair of the National Hemp Association, and Andrew Bish, president of the Hemp Feed Coalition. Together they represent HEMI — the Hemp Education and Marketing Initiative — which recently released its “Pushing Progress” framework, an industry-led effort to bring some structure to federal hemp policy. The attempts to do several things — not the least of which is to impose order on an industry...
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Cannabis Loves Community: Voices from the Industrial Hemp International Conference
Industrial Hemp Podcast
On this week’s hemp show we’re headed out to Colorado for the Industrial Hemp International Conference where hempsters from all across the value chain gathered to share ideas, make deals and be in community with one another. As a hemp podcaster, I had the unique opportunity to work in community with a couple of storytellers while I was there — Blaire Johnson and Jordan Berger — two independent filmmakers who teamed up for this special event. And what you’ll hear on this episode is the result of that collaboration. First we talk about their respective work — including Berger's...
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Can Argentina Solve Hemp’s Seed Problem?
Industrial Hemp Podcast
We’ve been covering industrial hemp on the podcast for eight years now, and the story of farmers getting bad seed is so common it barely feels like news anymore. It’s just accepted — low germination rates, inconsistent genetics and fields that never quite come in the way they should. But this is not OK. This is not how you grow an industry. If hemp is going to scale as a commodity crop, then it must behave like one and right now, it doesn’t. So when I was invited to Argentina to see a company building the SOPs for large-scale seed multiplication alongside one of the world’s top hemp...
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1937 International: Hemp Textiles, Pakistan to Product
Industrial Hemp Podcast
This week on the Hemp Show, we talk with Ryan Zaczynski, co-founder of 1937 International, a company working to build global supply chains for industrial hemp. In this episode, Zaczynski talks about what it takes to move hemp beyond niche markets and into real products that people use every day — by building supply chains that connect farms, textile mills and manufacturers around the world. At the center of that effort is Pakistan, where 1937 International is working in partnership with Dr. Zafar Riaz and his team to develop hemp production and tap into one of the world’s largest...
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Hemp in New Zealand: Policy, Markets and the Long Game
Industrial Hemp Podcast
Industrial hemp has been developing quietly in New Zealand for more than two decades. In this episode, we're talking with Richard Barge, treasurer of the New Zealand Hemp Industries Association, about how the sector has evolved — from early government trials in the early 2000s to a growing network of farmers, seed processors, fiber decortication facilities and researchers exploring hemp’s role in the bio-economy. Barge explains how New Zealand’s hemp industry has taken a deliberate approach to growth, scaling carefully as markets develop rather than chasing acreage without demand. The...
info_outlineOn this week’s podcast, host Eric Hurlock travels to Geneva, New York, on the top of Seneca Lake to take part in Cornell’s Hemp Field day, held Thursday, Sept. 11.
This episode covers both the morning and afternoon sessions for the field day.
The day started in Jordan Hall on Cornell’s Agritech Campus, where hemp program director Larry Smart got things started with a reminder why we were there in the first place.
“Hemp is an interesting crop, has a lot of potential, but there are some things that we just don’t understand about this crop,” he said.
The morning session was focused mostly on hemp grain as a livestock feed. Cornell scientists presented their research on broiler chickens, dairy cows and horses.
Andrew Bish from the Hemp Feed Coalition talked about the opportunity that hemp seed meal presents for farmers.
“If 5% of the chickens are eating 20% of their diet in hemp seed meal, you need almost 275,000 acres of hemp grain produced in the United States,” he said.
The morning session ended with Pennsylvania farmer Herb Grove from Brush Mountain Bison in Centre County, where he grows hemp grain and operates a bison feed lot and finishing operation.
“We started the bison industry in 2011, and we started raising hemp in 2019. 2011, we had six head of bison. At the end of last year, we had 300 animals on feed."
The afternoon session of the field day shifted from science to practice.
Bob Pearce from the University of Kentucky talked about the S-1084 multistate trials, which bring together universities from Louisiana to Vermont to test hemp cultivars across latitudinal differences and growing conditions.
"That’s the ultimate goal, making sure that a grower in New York knows which cultivars to pick for that location, and a grower in Kentucky or Tennessee has the opportunity to choose a cultivar that is well adapted to their conditions,” he said.
There were equipment demonstrations, discussions with seed suppliers, and a very interesting talk from Lynn Sosnoskie, weed science specialist at Cornell, who, because of the lack of chemistry labeled for hemp, stressed the importance of non-herbicide methods of weed management, especially equipment clean-out.
“We have to be focused on the weed seeds that we are moving from field to field, especially because we have Palmer amaranth in New York state now. We have waterhemp in New York state. These are two pigweed species. They are exceptionally competitive with our crops. They are spreading. You do not want to have one of these weeds get established in the fields where we have very few options of weed control,” she said.
The day ended with a demonstration of the mobile decorticator.
On this episode you will hear the voices of:
Larry Smart, Cornell University
Chuck Schmitt, New York Department of Agriculture & Markets
Luis Monserrate, Cornell University
Andrew Bish, Hemp Feed Coalition, Bish Enterprises
Raj Kasula, Wenger Group
Natalie Trottier, Cornell University
Morgan Tweet, IND HEMP
Xuedan Zhu, Cornell University
Tom Overton, Cornell University
Herb Grove, Brush Mountain Bison
Lynn Sosnoskie, Cornell University
Bob Pearce, University of Kentucky
Jacob Bish, Cornell University
Terry Moran, Kanda Hemp
Robin Destiche, KonopiUS
Corbett Mitteff, KonopiUS
Reuben Stone, UniSeeds
The trip to Cornell continues on the next episode with one-on-one interviews with Christine Smart, director of Cornell’s Agritech campus; Larry Smart, plant geneticist and head of Cornell's Hemp program; Luis Monserrate, doctoral candidate studying hemp fiber yields; and Jane Hamilton, a doctoral student studying the effects of UV light on powdery mildew on hemp.
Learn More:
Cornell University – Hemp Program
https://hemp.cals.cornell.edu
New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets
https://agriculture.ny.gov
New York State Office of Cannabis Management
https://cannabis.ny.gov
Hemp Feed Coalition
https://hempfeedcoalition.org
Kreider Farms / Kreider Feeds
https://www.kreiderfarms.com
University of Kentucky
https://hemp.ca.uky.edu
Kanda Hemp
https://kandahemp.com
UniSeeds
https://uniseeds.ca
KonopiUS
https://konopius.com
HempIT
https://hempit.fr
IND HEMP
https://indhemp.com
Bish Enterprises
https://bishenterprise.com
Hemp Harvest Works
https://hempharvestworks.com
Brush Mountain Bison
https://brushmountainbison.com
News Nuggets from HempToday.net
U.S. Democrats sign off on framework to rein in hemp intoxicants while protecting CBD
https://hemptoday.net/u-s-democrats-sign-off-on-framework-to-rein-in-hemp-intoxicants-while-protecting-cbd/
Trump administration push to trim red tape leaves hemp industry still tangled in rules
https://hemptoday.net/trump-administration-push-to-trim-red-tape-leaves-hemp-industry-still-tangled-in-rules/
Texas agencies directed to tighten oversight of hemp THC products under new order
https://hemptoday.net/texas-agencies-directed-to-tighten-oversight-of-hemp-thc-products-under-new-order/
Thanks to our Sponsors
IND HEMP
https://indhemp.com
Forever Green, distributors of the KP-4 Hemp Cutter
https://www.hempcutter.com/
National Hemp Association (NHA)
https://nationalhempassociation.org