Libsyn Directory

Inside Cornell AgriTech: Germplasm, Robots and Hemp

Release Date: 09/26/2025

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

More Episodes

On this week’s podcast, we continue our trip to Geneva, New York, for part two of the Cornell story. I spend some time with Christine Smart, director of Cornell AgriTech, and her husband Larry Smart, professor of plant breeding and genetics and head of Cornell’s hemp program.

Christine takes me through the history of the Agritech campus — from its 1882 founding to its living plant libraries and cutting-edge robotics labs. We talk Liberty Hyde Bailey, the USDA germplasm repository, and a future where UV light replaces pesticides and robots roam the fields.

Then Larry brings us inside Cornell’s hemp research: from gene editing for disease resistance to the painstaking process of seed multiplication. He shares his work on a CBG-only hemp line with zero THC and CBD, designed to open animal feed markets, and explains why F1 hybrids could unlock hemp’s yield potential the same way they did for corn.

And stay tuned, because next week in part three we’ll hear from two of the rising stars in Cornell’s hemp program — PhD students Jane Hamilton and Luis Monserrate.