This week’s hemp podcast is a recap of the 10th annual NoCo Hemp Expo in Estes Park, Colorado, April 11-13, where industry stakeholders gathered to collaborate, commiserate and celebrate the state of hemp in 2024. The episode features voices from many attendees, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. “We’re really all hands on deck to make sure Colorado continues to be an ag powerhouse, and hemp is a big part of that,” Polis said. State Ag Commissioner Kate Greenberg agreed with the governor and said the “conversation is really just diversified in what hemp is capable of.” Hemp researc ..read more

On this week’s hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming talks to Steve Groff from Cedar Meadow Farm in Holtwood, Lancaster County, where he is getting ready to plant 70 acres of industrial hemp. “This year it’s all fiber. And we’ll probably plant about 10 varieties,” Groff said. Of those 10, about a third will be what he calls his “core varieties“ that have performed well previously on his farm or in the Mid-Atlantic region in general. “We are going to be testing several other newer varieties that might perform well, that we need to basically, I’ll say, ground-truth and see how they work,” he said. As ..read more

On this bonus episode we talk to Andrew Bish and Morgan Tweet from the Hemp Feed Coalition, the advocacy group that has been working for four years to get hemp grain approved as a livestock feed. Opening up the feed markets is the one of the most important issues in the hemp industry today. Hemp grain was given tentative approval by AAFCO in January, with a final vote in August. On this episode the HFC folks respond to a recent blog post published by Agriculture Policy Solutions, another advocacy group with deep ties to the hemp industry, a blog post which at best confuses the issue and at wor ..read more

In this week’s hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming speaks with Ken Meyer, beekeeper and hemp processor from South Dakota. Meyer and his family run a fourth-generation beekeeping business as well as the state’s first industrial hemp processing facility. As a young man, Meyer enjoyed beekeeping but was encouraged by his elders to get an education instead of going into the family business, which he did, and he had a fruitful career as lawyer. In 2013, his dad and brother successfully recruited him back into the family business of keeping bees, and today he oversees the beeswax rendering facility as v ..read more

On this bonus episode of the Hemp Podcast, we talk to Mike Mercadante from Right Coast Hemp in Manahawkin, New Jersey, where the company is holding the first of a series of hands-on hempcrete work shops, May 10-12. The workshops are intended to give local builders and contractors a chance to get to know hemp as a material and see how the hempcrete process works. Learn more about Right Coast Hemp https://rchemp.com/ Learn more about Hearts of Mercy https://hearts-of-mercy.org/ Register for the workshop May 10-12 https://rchemp.com/learn-to-build-with-hemp-workshop/ Thanks to our sponsors: IND H ..read more

This week’s podcast guest Mattie Mead competed in a 2013 pitch competition at Hobart College in Geneva, New York. He had just shared his vision for a company that made building materials out of hemp. “One of the judges for the contest said, ‘So let me get this straight, you’re looking to build houses out of a Schedule 1 substance?’ “And I said, well, ‘Yes.’ “Today it’s a Schedule 1 substance, but in five or so years it’s going to be federally legal,” Mead said. “And I want to be on the forefront of what I believe to be an emerging industry.” Indeed, industrial hemp was legalized with the 2018 ..read more

  Hemp Podcast guest James “Jimmy” Cottrell II is a fourth-generation paper maker at family-owned Cottrell Paper in Saratoga County, New York. He started cutting the grass in high school and began working at the mill after graduation, and has worked his way up. Today he is director of maintenance for the mill and vice president of Mill26, Cottrell Paper’s hemp paper brand. The company was founded in 1926 when Cottrell’s great-grandfather began making electrical insulation paper. “We’ve always produced electrical insulating sheet,” Cottrell said. “It’s a specialty product, and nobody else ..read more

This week on the Hemp Podcast, Lancaster Farming talks with Maciej Kowalski, founder and CEO of Kombinat Konopny, a hemp company based in Elbląg, a Polish city on the Baltic Sea. Kombinat Konopny is a vertically integrated hemp operator working both in the herbal and fiber division. Kowalski said the company takes a no-nonsense approach to floral production and extraction. “Which means basically we are not doing extraction, because nature does it best,” he said. Instead of a complicated chemical extraction process, “we just mix hemp biomass with olive oil and then press it mechanically ..read more

This week’s hemp podcast is divided into two parts. Lancaster Farming talks with Shannon Powers from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture about some major changes to the hemp program in the Keystone State. “The first is that Pennsylvania is moving to a performance-based testing system for growers who are growing either for fiber or grain,” Powers said. Performance-based testing, she said, will reduce the amount of testing needed by growers if they meet basic requirements. Reduced testing means reduced costs for producers. The second change, Powers said, is the removal of the application ..read more

This week’s podcast guest is Robert Hoban, a cannabis attorney and industry leader. Hoban recently published a five-part series at Forbes.com in which he takes a deep dive on some of the most controversial issues in the hemp industry today. Hoban has had a full-spectrum cannabis career, having worked extensively on both sides of the marijuana/hemp divide. A few years before the 2014 Farm Bill opened a legal pathway for hemp in the U.S., Hoban was approached by a company that wanted to sell CBD, which at the time was a relatively unknown substance. “I was asked a very direct question,” he said ..read more