Libsyn Directory

Dakota Hemp: Building an Industry in South Dakota

Release Date: 04/16/2026

Industrial Hemp Podcast

This week on the Hemp Show we're digging into a few of the calendar items we mentioned on , specifically the run of events in New York state next month. On September 15, Cornell's 10th Annual Grain and Fiber Hemp Field Day comes to the Cornell AgriTech campus in Geneva. The field day will feature a John Deere combine demonstration that will include harvesting grain, drying the grain and putting the fiber harvest on display — baling it, decorticating it and splitting it into bast and hurds. Register here: Then, September 16–18, the National Industrial Hemp Council will hold its Global...

News Nuggets and Upcoming Hemp Events

Industrial Hemp Podcast

On this week’s Hemp Show we are focusing on recent news stories and upcoming hemp events, including the Farm-to-Fabric Hemp Textile Symposium in New York City, September 18-20. See the full list of events below. Plus a healthy helping of Hemp News Nuggets from HempToday.net: Ireland confronts hemp bottlenecks as Parliament weighs reforms to restart industry Botswana clears path to commercial hemp production after successful government trials Proposed EU carbon market update could boost business case for hemp starting in 2030 South Korea puts $21 million behind minor cannabinoids for...

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,...

More Episodes

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, they started asking questions about row spacing, fertility, yields, etc. Then suddenly it started to look like farming.

We also talk about where the processed hemp is going right now — animal bedding, early fiber markets — and what still needs to be built downstream to make this thing work at scale.

Plus, a quick look at how U.S.-grown hemp fiber is moving into global textile systems, and why new processing capacity is coming online even in places where acreage is still small.