Farm To Fork Column
By Victor Martino
Hemp cultivation is legal in California: Now what?
It’s now legal to grow industrial hemp in California. But this doesn’t necessarily mean farmers can start sowing hemp seeds in the soil this coming spring.
First, there’s the matter of the bureaucracy. The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has established an entity in Sacramento called the California Industrial Hemp Program, which is setting rules and regulations on hemp cultivation in California and will administer the process on the state level.
The state industrial hemp program includes the Industrial Hemp Advisory Board, which will advise CDFA and make recommendations pertaining to the cultivation of industrial hemp, including industrial hemp seed law and regulations, annual budgets, and the setting of an assessment rate.
The advisory board is comprised of various stakeholders related to hemp cultivation. There is a list of the members and their affiliations on the CFDA website, at: www.cdfa.ca.gov.
This is how the California Industrial Hemp Program defines industrial hemp:
“Industrial hemp means a crop that is limited to types of the plant Cannabis sativa L having no more than three-tenths of 1 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) contained in the dried flowering tops, whether growing or not; the seeds of the plant; the resin extracted from any part of the plant; and every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of the plant, its seeds or resin produced therefrom.”
Hemp isn’t the type of cannabis made famous in the 1960s during the ‘Summer of Love’ in San Francisco. You can smoke or eat all you want but it won’t make you high.
In addition to the state of California, the counties are also involved when it comes to hemp cultivation in the Golden State.
In fact, counties are the most important jurisdiction when it comes to farmers who want to grow hemp.
For example, they can slap a moratorium on legal hemp cultivation, like Yolo and Calaveras counties in Northern California have already done.
Farmers wanting to grow industrial hemp for commercial purposes also must register with their county agricultural commissioner prior to cultivation. The registration process hasn’t started as of late March. CDFA is in the process of developing the registration program and fees.
There’s also a federal consideration when it comes to hemp cultivation in California, which is the federal legalization of industrial hemp growing, which was passed by Congress as part of the 2018 Farm Bill and has been signed by President Trump.
It’s now legal on the federal level to grow hemp in the United States. However, like with California, the federal government hasn’t yet finalized rules and regulations.
The law allows states to set their own regulations and policies. There could be aspects of the federal law as part of the Farm Bill that will require negotiations between the feds and states. It’s too early to determine exactly how this aspect will manifest itself.
There’s great interest in hemp cultivation and its development into products ranging from CBD consumables and health and wellness products to building materials, clothing and much more in California. Farmers are looking to grow hemp and entrepreneurs and established companies are looking to develop hemp-based products.
The biggest commercial prize from hemp cultivation is expected to be the CBD-infused products noted above.
CBD (Cannabidiol) is a naturally-occurring compound found in the resinous flower of cannabis, a plant with a rich history as a medicine and wellness substance going back thousands of years. A safe, non-addictive substance, CBD is one of more than a hundred phytocannabinoids that are unique to cannabis and endow the plant with its robust therapeutic profile.
As little as three years ago, CBD consumable and health and wellness products barely registered as a product category in terms of sales. Today, it’s a category producing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues, with forecasters and analysts predicting annual sales of many billions of dollars within the next few years.
The Brightfield Group, which is a respected research firm, predicts the hemp-derived CBD market will reach $22 billion by 2022, according to its director of research, Bethany Gomez. Even 50% of $22 billion would be huge.
“CBD is the next healthcare phenomenon. It is so effective for so many conditions, is natural, non-psychoactive and has no known serious side-effects. It is the next hot, functional beauty ingredient, like collagen, shea butter or aloe. It can be grown domestically as a substitute for tobacco and provide a much-needed cash crop for American farmers,” Gomez recently wrote in a report.
The state of hemp cultivation in the State of California is currently a bit of a muddle. But things are moving fairly rapidly on the regulatory level, prompted in large part by the fact that hemp is getting bushels of attention in the media.
The fact the hemp industry is booming in states like Kentucky, where it’s been legal for a number of years, is also adding empirical evidence to the claims being made that industrial hemp has big potential as a significant cash crop for farmers.
Unlike its cousin marijuana, which over the last decade has increasingly become a crop grown indoors, requiring expensive high-tech grow-equipment, hemp is an outdoor crop grown in a field like corn and other traditional crops. This offers ordinary farmers who don’t have millions of dollars in investment capital a real opportunity.
Hemp is a coarse crop that grows like a weed. CBD for example is produced throughout the stems and stalks of the plant. Experts say the flowers produce the best-quality CBD.
Conversely, marijuana requires a much higher degree of horticultural expertise and effort to get value from it in the form of THC, the active ingredient that gets people high.
My suggestion to farmers interested in growing hemp is to start your education process now. The earlier you start on the learning curve the better success potential you’ll have.
Here are five things you should know to get started:
>Hemp is planted in dense stands that can rapidly grow higher than 10 feet tall and eventually hit 15 feet to 20 feet high. Many growers say they’ve never seen a taller, more dense crop.
>Hemp can be grown in relatively poor soil and is fairly drought-tolerant. However, according to growers and experts, a rich, well-drained loam is required to produce hemp that has commercial value. Irrigation is required to get the plants established in the first six weeks, but hemp requires less water than most all other crops produced in California afterward.
>Hemp’s commercial value right now is better than crops like soy and corn. But like with those crops you need a lot of acreage to make hemp cultivation truly profitable, unlike say with high value-added crops like asparagus or arugula.
>Hemp is fairly resistant to insects and disease. It also outgrows most weeds. These characteristics are an important positive consideration for farmers thinking about growing organic hemp. Right now the CBD industry is creating numerous organic consumable, topical and wellness products. This bodes well for increased demand for organic hemp.
>Because industrial hemp has been a prohibited crop for so long there is a lack of hemp seeds and modern machinery to process it. That’s starting to change though but it’s going to take a while to build the infrastructure.
Additionally, the market is young too so it’s more difficult right now to find buyers for harvested hemp than it is for other established crops. This too is changing rapidly though. A new hemp-based food or drink product seems to be coming out daily, for example.
The first place to visit if interested in growing hemp is the county agricultural commissioner’s office. It’s the direct point of contact for budding hemp farmers.
The California Hemp Association is also a valuable source of information.
Ben Lubbon, who works daily as an expert and lobbyist in Sacramento on hemp and cannabis legislative and related issues, told me there’s a lot of confusion right now regarding legal hemp cultivation in California.
Lubbon suggests all involved parties need to step back a bit and think the process through a bit more and improve communication. He’s particularly worried about counties rushing to put moratoriums and outright bans in hemp cultivation.
Right now we’re in the first inning of an opportunity to create a valuable new crop in California. Hemp is an old and proven crop top. Before cotton and before nylon was invented, all the rope produced in America was made from hemp, for example. Hemo is also being used as building insulation and to make an alternative concrete product called “Hempcrete.”
The opportunity with hemp is real. It’s not for every California farmer, obviously. But it adds a potentially lucrative cash crop to the list of the over 400 crops grown today in the Golden State.
