Hey there. I made a mistake on this week's episode, so if you hear something weird on the show, go back and downloaded it again. I fixed the issue and uploaded the new file. Thanks! -eric   ..read more

Members of the American Association of Feed Control Officials are scheduled to vote early next month on hemp seed meal as an ingredient for laying hens. Pretty standard stuff, according to the group’s executive director, Austin Therrell. “It’s one of the big things that our association does to promote harmonization and uniformity when it comes to defining ingredients and ingredient standards that all the state regulators across the U.S. recognize,” he said. Therrell is one of the guests on this week’s hemp podcast who weighs in on the planned vote, which has the potential to crack open the mar ..read more

This week on the hemp podcast we saddle up and gallop out to Gordonville, Lancaster County, for Horse Progress Days, a two-day celebration of all things horsepower. Nearly 40,000 people were in attendance July 5-6, mostly Amish and Mennonite farmers and families. The weather was hot, the air was thick with humidity and the sounds of horses whinnying. What does Horse Progress have to with industrial hemp? Good question. Bear with me. In one of the vendor tents there was a cluster of businesses that specialize in working with hemp. Cameron Macintosh, hempcrete builder at Americhanvre, was there ..read more

This week on the Hemp Podcast, Lancaster Farming talks with Kelly Burke from Kifcure, an Illinois-based hemp company that is focused on developing the hemp industry in the Land of Lincoln. Burke, along with her husband Jarett, have launched the Northern Illinois Hemp Hub, which recently hosted a hempcrete workshop in Maple Park, sixty miles west of Chicago. They are also growing about 1000 aces of industrial hemp and are developing plans for a processing facility, industrial park, and education center. On this episode, we will hear all about their endeavors, including Silver Acres, a hemp wedd ..read more

On this week’s podcast, we continue our coverage of the European Industrial Hemp Association (EIHA) annual conference, this year held in Prague, Czech Republic, June 5 to 7. As Lancaster Farming’s friendly neighborhood hemp reporter, I was invited to be part of an American delegation to the conference, funded in part by a grant from the USDA Market Access Program to build overseas markets for hemp as a commodity crop. Last week, I shared a slew of interviews with Europeans in attendance at the conference. This week, I am sharing my interviews with American business leaders, entrepreneurs ..read more

On this week’s Hemp Podcast, I recap my recent visit to the Heart of Europe, the Golden City, the City of a Hundred Spires, the capital city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia — Prague. The occasion for my trip was the European Industrial Hemp Association’s 21st annual Conference, this year held in the Czech Republic. I was invited to be part of an American delegation representing the American hemp industry. The trip was funded through a grant from the USDA Market Access Program, or MAPS. The Market Access Program allows the Foreign Agricultural Service ..read more

  On this week’s hemp podcast we discuss a recent amendment to the House draft of the 2024 Farm Bill known as the Miller Amendment, which was introduced by Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill. The amendment effectively bans all hemp products with any amount of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the naturally occurring chemical compound found in the cannabis plant. The 2018 Farm Bill defined hemp as any cannabis with less than 0.3% THC. But because of vague guidance from the Drug Enforcement Administration and Food and Drug Administration, a cottage market has developed for intoxicating products from other ..read more

On this week’s hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming talks to Czech hemp farmer, consultant and advocate Hana Gabrielová, who started her first hemp company, Hempoint, in 2010 and has been instrumental in developing the hemp industry in the Czech Republic and Europe ever since. More recently, with several American partners she founded KonopiUS, which distributes European hemp genetics in the U.S. and provides agronomy consulting services. Gabrielová said the regulatory process to grow hemp in the Czech Republic is relatively easy compared to the U.S., where growers need a permit, an FBI background c ..read more

Apologies to Jimmy Stewart. I only went to Washington for one day. I took the train from Philadelphia May 6 to record a podcast episode at the Ag on the Mall event on the National Mall in D.C. The National Hemp Association and the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council invited me to spend time at their display. They had a tent set up with tables full of products made from hemp: cat litter, animal bedding, shirts, rope, bio-plastics socks, flooring and biofuels. They even had a regular old 5-gallon bucket made from hemp. Next to the tent was The FiberCut, a four-tiered, adjustable-height sickle-bar ..read more

This week’s podcast takes us to a hempcrete workshop in Barto, Pennsylvania. That’s where Cameron McIntosh of Americhanvre Cast-Hemp hosted a four-day hands-on training session to teach the basics of the spray-applied method of hempcrete installation using the Ereasy system. Training began Saturday morning at McIntosh’s shop at a farm in Berks County. With a total of 14 participants and four assistant instructors, he said, “this is our single biggest training.” Attendees traveled from around the country and the world, including Texas, North Carolina, Minnesota, California, and British Columbia ..read more