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 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 first encountered them 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 in Alberta. Today, the technology is licensed and administered by another Canadian company, Renewabuild Field to Form, which has made improvements to the original design of the block.
The structural hemp blocks differ from traditional hempcrete construction because their internal frame makes them load-bearing in a way that spray-applied or cast-in-place hempcrete cannot offer.
"It has a frame inside it. It's a glass-filled biocarbonate frame ... and then the hempcrete is pressed around it," Meyer said. "And that frame provides a structure in the wall. So that makes the block a structural block, and the block itself in a wall system replaces the sheet rock, the insulation and the timber."
The story of the blocks continues now, as the first U.S. company prepares to manufacture them at a plant in Rock Valley, Iowa.
"At Complete Hemp Processing in Winfred, South Dakota, we decorticate hemp stocks. And we need a place to sell the hemp hurd. And our farmers need us to have a place to sell hemp hurd so they can put hemp in rotation with corn and soybeans," he said.
This is how an industry scales. Dedicated, passionate people working tirelessly to build a supply chain.
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The Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast returns this week with an interview featuring Ken Meyer, owner of Complete Hemp Processing in Winfred, South Dakota, and one of three co-founders of Renewabuild Great Plains — the first U.S.-licensed manufacturer of structural hempcrete blocks. Host Eric Hurlock sits down with Meyer to discuss the new hempcrete block factory being built in Rock Valley, Iowa, the long journey of the structural hemp block from Canada to the United States, and what this milestone means for the American industrial hemp industry, hempcrete construction, and the future of sustainable building materials.
Renewabuild Great Plains is the first U.S. company to license the structural hempcrete block technology developed by Just BioFiber of Alberta, Canada, and now administered by Renewabuild Field to Form. Unlike traditional hempcrete construction methods — including spray-applied hempcrete and cast-in-place hempcrete — the Renewabuild block features an internal glass-filled biocarbonate frame, making it a load-bearing structural wall component. A single block replaces sheetrock, insulation, and timber framing in one product, offering builders, architects, and engineers a scalable, lower-carbon alternative to conventional wall systems with improved fire resistance, durability, and building-envelope performance.
The new Rock Valley, Iowa hempcrete block factory is scheduled to receive its equipment in December 2026 or January 2027, with the capacity to produce two blocks a minute, more than 900,000 structural hempcrete blocks per year running three shifts. At full production, the facility will manufacture enough wall material for roughly 500 perimeter walls of 2,000-square-foot homes annually. The factory's entire production equipment fits inside two shipping containers, making the model regionally scalable across the United States — a key part of Renewabuild's strategy to support local farmers, local hemp processors, and local hempcrete construction supply chains. Meyer is joined as co-founder by John Peterson of Dakota Hemp and Bill Brehmer of Renewabuild Great Plains, alongside a group of Iowa farmers who have invested in the project.
This episode of the Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast also revisits archival audio from January 2019, when Pennsylvania hemp historian Les Stark first introduced the Just BioFiber structural hempcrete block at the Pennsylvania Farm Show, alongside the original podcast interview with Just BioFiber co-founder Michael D. Champlain. Listeners will also hear from David Geertz of Renewabuild, recorded at the International Hemp Building Symposium at Kansayapi in Minnesota. Plus, host Eric Hurlock follows up on last week's interview with Pennsylvania farmer Steve Groff with a statement from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture regarding agricultural innovation grant reimbursements. Subscribe to the Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast for in-depth coverage of industrial hemp, hemp farming, hempcrete construction, hemp processing, and the people building the American hemp supply chain.