Getting From HempToday to Hemp Tomorrow with Kehrt Reyher
Release Date: 05/01/2026
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_outlineThis 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 into the Lawful Hemp Protection Act introduced by Kentucky congressman Andy Barr, the future of CBD regulation in both the U.S. and Europe and why intoxicating hemp products have done lasting damage to the broader hemp industry.
We discuss Poland’s Institute of Natural Fibers and Medicinal Plants, the upcoming European Industrial Hemp Association conference in Poznań, Australia and New Zealand’s more practical hemp policies, hemp construction materials, micro-decorticators and why hemp must find its place inside larger natural fiber and biobased building markets.
As Kehrt puts it: true hemp is about fiber, food, and real industrial systems — not gas-station gummies.
This episode is a wide-ranging conversation about journalism, policy, construction, agriculture and the long unfinished work of building a real hemp economy.
Learn More
HempToday
European Industrial Hemp Association Conference
Institute of Natural Fibers and Medicinal Plants
News Nuggets
Draft bill in U.S. would wipe out intoxicants, rescue CBD, but what about ‘true hemp’?
hemptoday.net/draft-bill-in-u-s-would-wipe-out-intoxicants-rescue-cbd-but-what-about-true-hemp
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In this episode of the Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast, host Eric Hurlock sits down with Kehrt Reyher, publisher of HempToday and a longtime journalist covering the global industrial hemp industry. An American expat living in Poland for more than 30 years, Kehrt brings decades of experience from U.S. newspapers like the Providence Journal, Detroit News, and USA Today, along with deep international knowledge of hemp policy, CBD regulation, and industrial hemp supply chains across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
The conversation focuses on the growing divide between “true hemp” and the intoxicating hemp market. Eric and Kehrt discuss the Lawful Hemp Protection Act introduced by Kentucky Congressman Andy Barr, which aims to regulate synthetic intoxicating hemp products while preserving a legal path for wellness CBD. They examine how gas-station THC products and unregulated intoxicants have damaged the hemp brand and distracted policymakers from the original promise of the 2018 Farm Bill: building markets for hemp fiber, hemp grain, animal feed, and industrial hemp processing infrastructure.
Kehrt explains why he defines true hemp as the stalk and the seed—fiber, food, and industrial applications rather than cannabinoids alone. The episode explores the future of hemp construction materials, hempcrete, prefab building systems, and hemp-based bricks, along with broader conversations about biobased building materials and sustainable agriculture. They also discuss small-scale decortication systems, modular hemp processing, and why industrial hemp must compete within the larger natural fiber economy alongside flax, jute, and other bast fibers.
The episode also highlights the upcoming European Industrial Hemp Association conference in Poznań, Poland, hosted at the historic Institute of Natural Fibers and Medicinal Plants. Kehrt shares why he believes Australia and New Zealand are currently leading the world in sensible hemp policy and why Europe continues to offer stronger support for bio-based materials and industrial hemp development. This is a wide-ranging conversation about journalism, regulation, sustainability, and the long-term future of industrial hemp as a serious agricultural and manufacturing sector.