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Hempcrete Hero: Little House on the Podcast

Release Date: 07/17/2026

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,...

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...

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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 my recent trip to Poland, I found out there was a water leak in the Little House, which sent me on a mission of ripping and tearing — rugs, floors, decking and drywall. And before I knew it, I needed a new wall on the west end. And of course, it was going to be a hempcrete wall, right?

Hempcrete is hemp hurd — the woody inner core of the hemp stalk — mixed with a lime-based binder and water and packed around a wood frame like insulation. It's breathable, naturally resistant to pests and fire, and because hemp pulls carbon out of the air as it grows, a hempcrete wall can be carbon-negative. It's about as close as you can get to building a wall out of a farm field.

After years and years of following the industry, reporting on builders like Cameron McIntosh, Micaela Machado, Danny Desjarlais and Matt Marino, these people are my heroes. And now, after having made seven batches of hempcrete by hand, anyone who has ever built something out of hempcrete is my hero.

Luck favors the prepared, so I sought knowledge. I drove down to the Ice House in Ellicott City, Maryland, to learn from Gayle Killen. She taught me how to mix by hand, how to pack the edges better than the middle, and how to stay safe — PPE always, and a jar of vinegar handy to neutralize the lime.

Cameron McIntosh, up at his shop in Bally, confirmed the numbers and sent me home with hurd, buckets, tampers and a saw. Drew Oberholzer and Ana Konopitskaya of Coexist Build donated nine bags of lime binder. Acts of kindness bind us all together.

So I mixed and packed and mixed again, all through the Fourth of July weekend, sweating it out in the backyard, covered in lime burns, until a hempcrete wall stood where the old one used to be.

My kids tell me it smells like corn. But whatever it smells like, it looks like agriculture. Imagine if we could build our houses with locally sourced, annually renewable resources so we can survive, so our children can survive, so our children's children can survive. That's what this is about: the future, and learning how to do things so we can face it together. This hempcrete wall is emblematic of the changes you'll see coming. We're building, growing, making and doing.