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Pushing Progress in the DC Swamp

Release Date: 04/09/2026

From Field to Foot: Making Hemp Socks in Poland

Industrial Hemp Podcast

This week’s Hemp Show takes us once more back to Poland, where Maciej Kowalski gives us a tour of his vertically integrated hemp textile company in Elbląg, a small town in Northern Poland, not too far from the Baltic Sea. Today we'll let Kowalski guide us as we tour the Kombinat Konopny facility. His approach to business is straightforward: Make things people need. "What do they need? They need socks. They need beanies, they need pants, they need blouses, they need shirts, everything," Kowalski said. "The sock became like the symbol of what we're trying to achieve seven, eight years ago...

Hempcrete Hero: Little House on the Podcast

Industrial Hemp Podcast

We have an outbuilding at home — we call it the Little House. It's a small old barn that sits out in our back yard, maybe 25 feet from the back door. It was a barn for animals at one point, then a garage, then an apartment. There's a lot of interesting energy in the Little House. It's been many things over the years: an art studio, a bakery, a jewelry-making place. By 2018 the Little House had given birth to this very podcast. The Little House has been an epicenter of entrepreneurial spirit and love for a long time. When I got home from , I found out there was a water leak in the Little...

Encore Presentation of Michael Klepacz's First Interview on Hemp Show, March 2024

Industrial Hemp Podcast

This is a special encore edition of an interview we published on YouTube two years ago. This is my conversation with Michael Klepacz, an Ohio native and Air Force veteran who moved to Poland in 2012 and founded Natural Materials Unlimited, a company that makes textiles and products from hemp, linen and other bast fibers. In this bonus episode, he talks about how the business grew from hemp wick to guitar straps, pet accessories and custom fiber products for clients around the world. The conversation digs into long fiber versus short fiber hemp: why long fiber produces stronger, higher-quality...

Michael Klepacz: An American in Warsaw

Industrial Hemp Podcast

This week on the Hemp Show, we continue our , catching up with American expat Michael Klepacz, owner of Natural Materials Unlimited. Klepacz sits near the end of the hemp supply chain — he doesn't grow or process raw fiber himself. Instead, he sources hemp and other natural fibers from regional mills and turns them into finished goods, from hemp wick to dog leashes, as a contract manufacturer for brands worldwide. Klepacz gives us a walking tour of his factory — beeswax, waxing lines and a dynamometer that tests twine strength — and makes the case for hemp as Europe's best fiber. We're...

Julia Bialecka — Replacing Styrofoam with Hemp and Mycelium

Industrial Hemp Podcast

This is part six of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. Julia Bialecka is CEO and co-founder of S-Lab, short for Sustainable Laboratory. The company uses hemp and mycelium to make packaging that replaces expanded polystyrene. Based in Spain, S-Lab has already piloted its material with L'Oréal, Nespresso and JTI. "Every polystyrene Styrofoam packaging unit that was ever produced still remains somewhere on the landfills because it's...

Beau Whitney — Making the Economic Case for Hemp, One Spoon at a Time

Industrial Hemp Podcast

This is part seven of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. Beau Whitney is the founder of Whitney Economics, based in Portland, Oregon. He has tracked the economics of hemp and cannabis since 2014, and his data is a fixture at industry events around the world. But he found that the numbers alone didn't always land with audiences. "When I would start talking about hemp as an automobile part or as a substitute for lithium EV...

Caroline Matthews — Tatham's Compact Decortication Line for Small Hemp Farmers

Industrial Hemp Podcast

This is part eight of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. Caroline Matthews represents Tatham, a fiber processing machinery company based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. Tatham is a 200-year-old, fifth-generation family business that started in wool processing — carding and spinning — and has moved into hemp over the last decade or so as interest in the crop has grown. Today the company manufactures hemp decortication and...

Lorenza Romanese — Hemp as a Building Block of the Bioplastics Economy

Industrial Hemp Podcast

This is part nine of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. View the whole series . Lorenza Romanese is Secretary General of European Bioplastics, the Brussels-based trade association representing bio-based and biodegradable plastics across Europe. She came up through the European hemp industry, and while her day job is now bioplastics, she says her heart stays with hemp — which she argues is a building block of the European bioeconomy,...

Bob Hoban — The "Hemp Cliff" and What Comes Next

Industrial Hemp Podcast

This is part ten of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. Bob Hoban is an attorney and consultant in the international cannabis and hemp space, based in Denver, Colorado. He has advised governments, companies and trade organizations across multiple continents, and in this Hemp in Poland series finale, he turns his attention to a deadline looming over the U.S. industry. "So we've got what I've kind of come to refer to as the hemp cliff...

Ken Elliott & Rusty Peterson — What US Hemp Can Learn From Europe

Industrial Hemp Podcast

This is part one of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. The series starts with a casual conversation with Ken Elliott and Rusty Peterson from IND HEMP in Montana about the conference itself and how it compares to hemp events back home. "The professionalism that they bring, the fact that they've been doing things instead of talking about things in Europe is a big difference,“ Elliott said. Both Elliott and Peterson spoke at the...

More Episodes

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 Pushing Progress framework attempts to do several things — not the least of which is to impose order on an industry that’s been a swirl of chaos since its inception.

First, clear lanes must be established. Fiber and grain over here, cannabinoids over there — with their own rules.

Next, make it easier for agriculture to adopt this crop by removing regulatory tensions and creating real access to markets — so a farmer can plant hemp with some confidence about where it’s going and how it’s going to get paid.

As Bish puts it, “We’re coming at it from the industrial aspect, trying to figure out how we make sure that we have farmers that can successfully grow industrial hemp products and that hemp products can be in the marketplace without a tremendous amount of restriction.”

Then, put some guardrails around the cannabinoid side. Not to shut it down, but to bring it out of this gray area where anything goes and everything gets called hemp.

And maybe most importantly, get the federal agencies on the same page — USDA, FDA, the whole alphabet — so we’re not dealing with this split-screen reality where one arm of government tolerates something and another one ignores it.

Because right now, we don’t have a system. We have fragments.

And what they’re trying to do — whether you agree with every piece of it or not — is build something that actually functions like an industry.

And part of that — this is important — is money.

They’re asking for roughly $600 million in federal funding to help stand up the infrastructure this industry still doesn’t have — processing, research, supply chains.

That's a lot of money.

But their argument is pretty straightforward: Every major crop we take for granted today had decades of public investment behind it. Hemp didn’t.

So if hemp is going to become a real agricultural commodity — not just an idea — we have to decide whether we’re willing to build it, or just keep talking about it.

Plus, we’ve got a handful of news nuggets this week, including a slightly head-scratching, maybe-kind-of-important move from the FDA on CBD and a letter from seed guy Terry Moran, who read my Argentina episode and basically said, “Hold on a second…” and brought the whole conversation back down to earth.

Listen up, y’all.