2022 Fall Farm Outlook

2022 Fall Farm Outlook Lincoln Daily News Oct 2022 Page 17 Is hemp an option for Logan County? An old crop with electrifying new possibilities The two fastest growing plants in the world are bamboo, and hemp, both grown in almost any soil type, with much rain or little, and with or without the addition of soil additives and fertilizers. Bamboo has proven itself to be a versatile and unique manufacturing material, but hemp outpaces bamboo by a factor of ten thousand possibilities. Industrial hemp is thought to be the versatile crop of the future. Hemp is a relative of marijuana, and has suffered from this nefarious distinction. Until the first half of the 20th century, hemp was grown across the world and used for everything from food products (from the seed) to clothing production (from the fiber) to building materials (using the fiber in compressed form or as an addition to concrete) to insulation for buildings. Every day industry was finding new uses for hemp, and then the industry came to a screeching immediate halt when in 1937, hemp was banned because of it’s relationship to it’s narcotic cousin. Although industrial hemp contains only 0.3% of the psychoactive ingredient THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), rendering it incapable of producing a high when smoked or ingested like it’s notorious cousin, hemp production was banned at the beginning of the international drug wars as an overreaction to imagined detrimental societal effects. Thus began the dark ages of hemp production, when all but small research projects continued. It was because of the results of these small research projects that congress reconsidered and reversed itself at least in part in 2017 when it undertook a new look at industrial hemp production and its amazing benefits. The list of possible products that would make the world much better environmentally began to spark the imaginations of even conservative lawmakers, and in 2018 congress allowed the reopening of the commercial production of hemp on a limited and licensed basis. Producers could not be licensed if they had been convicted of any felony within the last 10 years. In 2018 production was limited to a small acreage (less than 36,000 acres nationwide), and then in 2021 the USDA issued final guidance on the production of industrial hemp, encouraging its licensed production and use. But banks and financial institutions continued to enforce a prejudice against hemp production by restricting loans for its growth and processing. CONTINUED --