Industrial Hemp in Oregon

Raho · Sep 8, 2019

pipeline said:
https://norml.org/news/2019/05/23/r...e-cbd-products-contaminated-with-heavy-metals

Report: Majority Of Commercially Available CBD Products "Contaminated" With Heavy Metals

Thursday, 23 May 2019
Washington, DC: CBD-infused products commercially available in retail stores and online often contain heavy metals, such as lead and arsenic, and typically contain less-than-advertised quantities of cannabidiol, according to a network news investigation of third-party testing results.
Investigators reviewed results for over 240 CBD-infused products. Their analysis determined that "70 percent" of the products were found to be "highly contaminated with heavy metals like lead and arsenic, herbicides like glyphosate and a host of other contaminants including pesticides."
In addition, "more than half" of the products tested contained percentages of CBD that were inconsistent with the product's labeling. Some products tested negative for any trace of CBD.
The results are consistent with those of previous reports – such as those here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here – which similarly determined that many commercially available CBD-infused products are of variable potency and may contain potentially harmful adulterants and heavy metals.
Earlier this month, NORML submitted written testimony to the US Food and Drug Administration recommending that the FDA provide regulatory guidelines governing product manufacturing, standardization, and quality.
For more information, please see the NORML fact-sheet 'FAQs About Cannabidiol.'

I wonder how much of this contamination comes from Cannabis' function as a bio-accumulator, picking up contamination that already exists in the soil where it is grown.
As much as I support making sure all commercial cannabis products are safe and clean, it scares me to know how much of these dangerous substances are now in everything we eat, plants and animals grown on the same land that go completely untested by the FDA.
If the food industry was subjected to the testing required for cannabis, none of us could afford to eat their products.

Maybe the unintended consequence of something like that would be an increase in the number of people growing their own produce?

Life in a polluted world . . . :-(

Slim Pickens · Sep 10, 2019

^
Exactly.

Ev.ry.thing is likely contaminated.Micro greens grown in coco might not be...but who knows?

G.O. Joe · Sep 11, 2019

If this is domestic material, maybe the metals say something about the price and location of the grow sites being bought?

flylowgethigh · Nov 3, 2019

Aotf said:
Minimum five acres plus handling and processing licensing too which weren't outlined by OP. Not too difficult, though. Hemp CBD is just like any other strain, without genomic markers we are left to search for quality cultivars. Not all hemp produces CBD in sufficienct or useable quality. So not the quite a panacea for going a "cheaper" road for medicinal quality.

Huge potential for a state that really has agriculture centered only in the Willamette Valley, which is fine...This is a borderline desert shrub; Eastern Central and Steens and Blue Mountain areas would be badass for hemp farming, especially interlaced with all the Medicago sativa that is grown everywhere else around there.....

5ac is a big jump. Maybe only a few plants per ac would let the learning curve be easier on fewer total plants. 1000 plants to the acre is a big commitment IMO.

pipeline · Dec 9, 2019

socioecologist said:
Oregon CBD vs. Phylos Biosciences

It’s not easy for a new entrant to separate itself from the herd stampeding into hemp-derived CBD products, to lend a sheen of legitimacy that might entice investors. But one apparent technique is to invoke Seth and Eric Crawford.

That’s what the Virginia company Exactus Inc. did in early March. Pivoting hard from a stalled point-of-care medical diagnostics business, Exactus boasted that it was “assured supply of superior seed genetics and has placed a large order for seed provided by … the highly regarded Crawford Brothers hemp seed genetic stock company.”

That would be Oregon CBD, which might qualify as the most successful startup in the short but fevered history of legal Oregon cannabis.

Founded in 2015, the company beat big agricultural players to the punch and is literally selling hemp seeds to farmers as fast as it can produce them. This year, that could translate into $50 million in sales for the Crawfords, who grew up in a hand-built log cabin in Josephine County, where they were regulars in cut-flower competitions at the county fair.

“We took the risk to build this when it made sense for a small private company with no outside investors,” Seth Crawford said. “None of the publicly traded or investor-driven companies were going to do this.”

But the kind of money the Crawfords are making gives off a scent as powerful as the terpene-rich hemp varieties they develop. The brothers are dedicated to remaining independent and supporting a craft vision for Oregon's industry. But can they maintain their leadership position as the regulatory terrain opens up, bringing the threat of big-money competitors? It’s a question another Oregon-born cannabis leader is contemplating.

“We are in a magic window now, where we are not competing with all the multinational corporations that do this science,” said Phylos Bioscience CEO Mowgli Holmes.

The Portland-based genetics company is stepping up its efforts to develop improved cannabis plants, including hemp. Like Oregon CBD, Phylos promotes a future of diverse, interesting, quality-focused Oregon producers. But it knows the clock is ticking.

“When things open up, that's going to be terrible for us," Holmes said. "Truly terrible. Politically, we want full legalization. Practically, for us, that just means that all the big ag companies are going to come in and crush us.”

The fear may be exaggerated, but the threat is real.

Hempification

One thing that’s clear is that hemp will be a bigger part of Oregon's cannabis future than anyone might have imagined when voters passed recreational legalization in 2014. But the seed of hemp’s growth was planted that very year, when President Barack Obama signed into law a Farm Bill that authorized state-sanctioned research and pilot programs.

The plant had a long history in the U.S. as a fiber crop, cultivated at Monticello and Mount Vernon by those famous hippies Jefferson and Washington. It came under assault in the 1930s as marijuana hysteria swelled, and growing hemp was more or less banned when the plant was lumped in with marijuana in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.

They are the same plant — Cannabis — but with a key difference. What defines hemp is the near-absence of the intoxicating compound THC, by law limited to 0.3 percent concentration in a world where THC levels in recreational weed frequently top 20 percent.

That difference is one factor in hemp’s reemergence; the other lies in what it can share with cannabis: other cannabinoids, and terpenes, sought for their medicinal qualities. These compounds can be highlighted in a “wide” or “full” spectrum oil. In addition, CBD, the most sought-after cannabinoid — so far — can be isolated and processed to a powder.

Last September, analysts at Brightfield Group forecast that the CBD market would grow from around a half-billion dollars in 2018 to $22 billion in 2022.

Farmers in Oregon have stepped up to meet rising demand. In 2015, the first year of a federally sanctioned state program, 13 growers registered with the Oregon Department of Agriculture; by last year, the number was up to 584. In December, a new Farm Bill signed into law by President Donald Trump ended prohibition of hemp, and although full implementation won’t come until next year, the Oregon grower count for this year was at 1,008 and rising as of Monday. Those growers said they expect to plant 28,783 acres, a nine-fold increase over 2017.

Around half that crop will come courtesy of tens of millions of $1 apiece seeds from the Crawford brothers.

Good seed

“There are cheaper seeds,” said Cody White, owner of Willamette Valley Growers, which plans to plant at least 750 acres of hemp this year using Oregon CBD seeds. “The big draw (with Oregon CBD) is they are proven. When you plant them in the field, you get what they say you’re going to get, and that’s definitely not always the case in hemp.”

The first thing the seeds have going for them is that they are all female, “feminized” in a traditional breeding process — no GMOs here — accelerated by the use of advanced technologies.

Wait: Make that 99.97 percent female — 1 in 4,000 plants is likely to show male characteristics, Seth Crawford said. This remarkably low rate eliminates the risk of male interlopers pollinating their neighbors and rendering them seedy and lower in cannabinoids.

Each Oregon CBD variety, with names such as Suver Haze, Elektra, Special Sauce and Lifter, has a different profile, but overall they deliver an average 15 percent CBD content while crucially coming in under the THC limit, the Crawfords say. At last year’s prices — likely to slide as supply grows, though nobody really knows — a farmer could plant their seeds, harvest a couple thousand pounds, dry it, sell it and handily clear $50,000 to $100,000 from an acre.

These staggering figures raise the question: Why haven’t the Crawfords just been growing the stuff themselves?

“You mean, why didn’t we take all our seeds and grow 1,000 acres and become millionaire monopolists?” Seth Crawford responded when asked the question. “Because it’s the antithesis of what we’re in this for.”

“We make ethical choices,” Eric added.

Garage breeders

Seth, 38, described himself and Eric, 34, as “really screwed up backwoods, libertarian, hippie kids.” It was only a bit of a joke that reflected a counterculture nature ballasted by practical and intellectual chops: Eric has horticulture and environmental science degrees from Oregon State University and ran his own landscape construction business; Seth’s degrees include a Ph.D in sociology from the University of Oregon.

The front-man in the duo, Seth taught classes at OSU and Willamette University. In a keynote address he gave at a Vermont hemp conference, available on YouTube, he talked about being “deinstitutionalized,” his way of describing leaving academia. He delivered the talk, by the way, in bare feet.

Before Oregon CBD, the brothers were longtime garage breeders and medical growers and were in fact among those first 13 Oregon hemp registrants in 2015, sowing 3.5 acres with clones they had developed for the medical market, turning off the THC through inbreeding. They sold their hemp to medical-market oil producers, and the profits allowed them to lease 63 acres in 2016. They looked out at that field and realized they needed feminized, stable, high-quality seeds that they could count on.

Great seeds, they concluded, were the key to empowering independent farmers, and hemp was the right corner of cannabis to focus on.

“Total demand for THC could be met by about 6,000 acres if it’s produced right in Southern Oregon,” said Seth Crawford, whose dissertation was on the political economy of cannabis. “Sixty acres in Oregon could meet the state’s demand. That is a small market easily captured by folks with a lot of capital.”

With lower barriers to entry and a potentially vast market for its key compounds, hemp offered an enduring crop. The big guys might grab 80 percent of the market, and their hemp would be processed into commodity oil or isolate, but Oregon was uniquely positioned to serve the other 20 percent, the market that demanded the good stuff, rich in resin for processing or flower.

To serve this clientele, here and across the nation, the brothers developed early varieties that mature before fall rains arrive, and “auto-flowering” plants that mature without the shift in sunlight typically required. They're also primed to release a seed that produces the hard-to-find cannabinoid CBG, about which there is much buzz these days.

To stay ahead, they’re throwing up 8,200-square-foot greenhouses — sealed to protect their plants from cross-pollination — as fast as crews can pour the concrete slabs they rest on, and putting them to work as soon as the power company makes the grid connection. By June, they’ll have 90,000 square feet of growing space at their headquarters southwest of Salem, another 35,000 square feet spread across three other Willamette Valley sites and a separate 37,000-square-foot R&D center.

They’re also spending more than $1 million on what Seth describes as “in-house next-generation genome sequencing equipment” — $500,000 on the sequencer itself, the rest on five full-time employees for that arm of the business. The headcount that was around a half-dozen a year ago is roughly 20 now.

It’s all financed by cash flow. Their seeds sell like Springsteen tickets, as growers around the nation rush to get in orders when offerings come up on the Oregon CBD website, and occasionally whine on social media if they’re left out.

'I know this is crazy'

Demand is also high for the services of Phylos Bioscience. The company is generating revenue, though not enough to feed the growth its leadership believes it needs.

“We are growing the business ahead of revenue, by design,” Ralph Risch, the chief operating officer, said. “The opportunities are so big. This is one of those industries you really want to be investing in for the future.”

The company was founded in 2014, a year after CEO Holmes returned to Oregon from New York City, where he earned a Ph.D at Columbia University and worked as a molecular and evolutionary biologist. Where the startup would go wasn’t exactly clear, but Holmes and co-founder Nishan Karassik believed there were opportunities around bringing science to cannabis.

Science wasn’t so sure.

“People were nervous about cannabis,” Holmes said. “A lot of our key early hires were people I had to reach out to and say, ‘I know this is crazy, but just get a cup of coffee with me and let me tell you what's happening in this industry. I think you're going to find that it's not as crazy as you thought.’”

The founders were comfortable around pot, both having grown up in rural Oregon, including for Holmes on a commune outside Dexter, in the foothills southeast of Eugene.

"Our families shared a booth at the Oregon Country Fair, and our families still go back and work at that booth at the Country Fair every year,” Holmes said. “We have roots that overlapped with the old-school Oregon cannabis industry.”

In its first few years, Phylos developed genotype and sex tests for cannabis, giving breeders and growers new insights into their plants and the ability to weed out males much earlier in the growing process. The trick and the triumph was in devising ways of collecting plant material without running afoul of federal laws that prohibited its interstate transfer.

These businesses inched the company toward becoming a plant breeder, and it tip-toed in further in partnerships with growers. Now it’s unambiguously taking the plunge, looking to develop new cannabis plant varieties.

“We just realized eventually we had to do it ourselves,” Holmes said.

Up to $2.5 million is expected to go into a Hillsboro plant breeding facility that will open in June. Itstands as a fitting metaphor for the ups and downs of Oregon cannabis: Once a nursery, it had been in the process of being converted into a grow for the new recreational market. Then the market crashed.

“They realized it would be many years before they could run a profitable operation at that scale, if ever in Oregon,” Risch said. “And so we stepped into this and we were able to start with all the infrastructure they had built and then add to it to make it a really highly controlled environment.”

The company is also developing facilities in Sacramento and Colombia “and probably in Canada, shortly,” Holmes said. “And we’re hiring 20 breeders from universities and from big ag companies.”

Phylos has raised about $15 million in VC, company executives said, and a January filing with the Securities Exchange Commission indicated that it could be seeking as much as $20 million more.

The workforce, at 39 a year ago, will hit 65 this week, according to Paige Hewlett, the VP of marketing, with another 10 hires slated by the end of the quarter.

Finding talent isn’t as hard as it once was.

“Now we are inundated,” Holmes said. “When we post an ad, we get thousands of responses.”

Competitors circling

Phylos has the gloss of a tech startup, occupying the top two floors of a five-story Southeast Division Street building that offers views of the Tilikum Crossing and downtown, has a Cuban bar downstairs and features a mesmerizing 70-foot muralof a woman with live plants as hair.

It’s a far different feel than Oregon CBD’s rumpled rural outposts, but Holmes sounds a lot like the Crawford brothers when it comes to building an industry-leading, sustainable craft cannabis sector in Oregon.

“When the federal walls fall, Oregon should be in a position to supply the rest of the country with the boutique top-shelf flower that we hope we’ll continue to excel at as the rest of the industry goes to vast fields of weed that are getting mowed down for oil production,” Holmes said. “We want to make sure that there is a place for artisanal flower production and that is only an option coming out of Oregon and Northern California. And we think we can breed better plants that will help them survive.”

But first it needs to survive.

While hemp is emerging as a bigger part of Phylos' future — in some ways moving it into indirect competition with Oregon CBD — unlike the Crawfords, Phylos is very much in THC cannabis. There, the regulatorylandscape shows signs of shifting dramatically, as a new Democratic majority in the House drives federal reform. Mainstream corporate money has already been trickling into cannabis; a federal opening could bring a flood.

“I think we have a path now,” Holmes said. “We feel confident. But we would like this magic window to go on a little longer.”

Oregon CBD, meanwhile, sits in the Willamette Valley, a seed-producing powerhouse — grass seed production alone was valued at $455 million. The brothers literally pass potential competitors as they drive between their sites.

But Seth Crawford thinks the company has some things working in its favor. First, a rush into hemp by mainstream breeders isn’t likely to happen until the U.S. Department of Agriculture implements the new Farm Bill provisions for next year’s growing season. That’s one more year for Oregon CBD to push forward, to solidify its standing as the purveyor of craft-quality, resin-rich, low-THC, it-won’t-fail-you hemp seed.

“When those big companies do jump in, they’ll have to do multiple years of work to catch up,” he said.

That would suggest that Oregon CBD could be a prime target for a company with deep pockets that’s looking to catch up. Mergers and acquisitions are rampant in the cannabis space — just last week Marijuana Business Daily reported 14 deals in a single week. Is an exit in the Crawfords’ future?

“We always say no,” Seth Crawford said. “The day we lose our passion for pushing the science forward with this industry and this plant is the day we shut down. We will not sell out. We have no interest in answering to others who may have financial interest driving their decision-making process.”

Thats awesome! Congratulations! Keep up the good work! Thanks for sharing!

You guys have a Merry Christmas! :smoke:

How is the progress going on the breeding programs?

Is the amplification phase of 0% THC hemp doing well?

When will some of these new varieties be released?

Where can I look to find out where I can order CBD oil processed from your seed?

Chunkypigs · Dec 9, 2019

Hmmm, if you have not been following things close their CBD seeds are too hot for the new legal hemp regs and they stopped selling them recently. The CBG varieties don't test as high as advertised and he cut the price on those from $2 to $1 per seed a couple weeks ago.

the COA's on their high CBG lines are on thier website but I could only find them by looking through their blog posts.
they were not 300:1 though and it didn't look like you could successfully concentrate them and be legal.
probably they need more time. I really have my doubts that there's a market for this kind of weed in traditional form.
even processed how many inactive forms of cannabinoids are going to get trendy?

Hemp prices are in free fall now as so many people grew tens of thousands of acres more this year than there were buyers or processors for.

Handful of stores selling hemp flowers for marijuana prices but we don't have millions of folks looking to buy weed that doesn't get you high in the USA.

There are stores here with $15 hemp prerolls in them but I can't imagine anyone buying a second one, lol.

There are $8 a pack hemp cigarettes that look like Marlboro on the shelf in the stores here also that are not high CBD.

Recent auction in Tennessee tells the story of how low the prices are falling.

Saw folks on IG claiming $600 a unit sales price on CBG flowers in October but prices were below $200 at the auction and CBD at 50 cents a point.

This years $17 high CBD pound will probably go to 5 bucks next year for those lucky enough to find buyers and sit firmly at worthless for most growers who find zero takers in this current glut.

https://hempindustrydaily.com/hemp-biomass-auction-off-to-a-rocky-start-with-more-events-soon/

Rocky start for inaugural hemp auction, but more events are planned

Optimism around a three-day hemp auction in Tennessee turned to disappointment when producers found way more sellers than buyers, driving prices down and leaving some frustrated.

But organizers of the inaugural International Hemp Auction and Market, modeled after tobacco auctions in the area, say the market volatility will settle down, making future auctions more valuable.

The oversupply in November was too much for farmers such as Ryan Rowlett, a hemp grower from Greeneville, Tennessee, who returned home from the auction in Franklin with the 2,500 pounds of CBD biomass he’d taken to sell.

“There were too few buyers and too much biomass,” Rowlett said. “I was hoping there would be enough buyers to compete and drive up the price.”

Lopsided market

The auction drew hundreds of farmers from around the country with thousands of pounds of biomass, hemp flower and CBD oil, and roughly 70 registered buyers attended.

The uneven ratio of buyers and sellers didn’t faze auction founder and CEO Mark Case, who pointed out that most auctions don’t have equal numbers of buyers and sellers.

“If you have 1,000 buyers on the Chicago Board of Trade, but the commodity is not selling for more than $2.67 a pound, you’re not going to have more money,” said Case, who is also a hemp farmer and processor.

“Once you meet a point in the market, the number of buyers doesn’t make a difference.”

Case, who declined to share final sales figures, acknowledged the auction timing could have been better for farmers, considering dropping prices for biomass and hemp flower.

“The objective was that transparent playing field, and that did happen – it’s just unfortunate it was when the market price was poor, because of the appearance of oversupply,” he said.

Bidding wars

Problems started on the first day of the sale, when 160,000 pounds of biomass, representative samples of what farmers still had to sell back at home, were tested and readied for bidding.

Casey Flippo, CEO and co-founder of Little Rock, Arkansas-based extractor firm Natvana, told Hemp Industry Daily he knew there was trouble when he arrived in Franklin and 75% of the biomass had been through the auction but nothing had been sold. The bids were coming in too low.

“They literally stopped, sent the buyers to the back and asked to let them adjust a little bit, and that’s how we proceeded from there,” Flippo said.
Case paused the auction to talk with both buyers and sellers about why the crops weren’t selling.

In contracts for auction participants, floor prices had been set at:

$1 per percentage point under 10% CBD.
$1.25 per percentage point over 10% CBD for biomass.
$100 per pound of CBD flower.

“Now, that’s a low price. But a month earlier, people were paying less than $1 (per point for biomass) in Oregon, so I was thinking surely we’d get at least that and hopefully $1.50-$2.50 a pound,” Case said.

According to the November hemp report from PanXchange, an online trading platform based in Denver, biomass sold for $0.80 to $1.40 per CBD percentage point, down from $1.61 to $2.71 per point in October.

Meanwhile, Colorado winterized crude oil prices were $750 to $1,300 per kilogram, down 16% from October prices of $850 to $1,600 per kilogram, comparatively.

The end prices went below the floor. Case said that many farmers told him they just wanted to unload their hemp and chose to sell under the baseline prices.

“The general consensus was that there were people that wanted to get out of the market and they wanted to sell under the support price,” Case said.

According to Case, the final prices were:

50 cents to $1.10 per percentage point for biomass.
Up to $75 per pound for smokable CBD flower.
Up to $200 per pound for CBG flower.
$600 per kilo for CBD crude oil.

Price points under pressure

Hemp flower was sold on the second day of the auction and went better, according to Flippo. Case reopened bidding for biomass on the last day to give farmers another opportunity to sell their crops.

“It’s very hard to come up with new ideas and bring it to fruition and not have hiccups,” Flippo said.

Although Rowlett didn’t sell his biomass or flower at the auction, he said he made some valuable contacts.

“I didn’t think the auction would be the end-all, be-all solution, but it helped facilitate a lot of things,” Rowlett said.

Prices could have been better, Flippo said, but he told Hemp Industry Daily he suspects many of the buyers were there to see how good of a deal they could get.

Other baseline issues prevented transactions from happening.

With the current patchwork regulation in states across the U.S., some buyers who planned to take their hemp back to hemp states that measure total THC couldn’t bid on some lots, Case said.

Because Tennessee currently measures only delta-9 THC instead of total THC, the levels were fine for in-state buyers and other adjacent states testing for delta-9 only.

“There was some really good quality – we had some real clean, green, 21% (CBD) and we had some real poor quality 8% (CBD). And some people just didn’t have good quality in general,” Case said.

“I don’t like to be quite so frank with farmers because I’m a farmer, so I understand their pain,” he said. “But I’m a processor as well, so I understand the difficulties (with poor quality crops), and we were very honest and forthright” about quality.

More opportunities to sell

The first attempt at an auction in the hemp industry had some speed bumps, Case admits.

He said his staff is working to correct the issues with logistics, procedures, pricing and fees by forming an advisory board of hemp industry members and relaunch a series of regional auctions starting in the spring.

No dates or locations are set yet, but the invitations have been rolling in from North Carolina, Oregon and Texas, Case said.

Another company sponsored a hemp auction on Dec. 7 in New York City.

pipeline · Dec 9, 2019

Thanks! Its some growing pains for the hemp industry. We have lots of growers but need more infrastructure. A friend of mine is in the midwest hemp society, an industry advocacy and educational outreach group. Purdue University is continuing in their research.

https://purduehemp.org//

geneva_sativa · Dec 9, 2019

Raho said:
I wonder how much of this contamination comes from Cannabis' function as a bio-accumulator, picking up contamination that already exists in the soil where it is grown.
As much as I support making sure all commercial cannabis products are safe and clean, it scares me to know how much of these dangerous substances are now in everything we eat, plants and animals grown on the same land that go completely untested by the FDA.
If the food industry was subjected to the testing required for cannabis, none of us could afford to eat their products.

Maybe the unintended consequence of something like that would be an increase in the number of people growing their own produce?

Life in a polluted world . . . :-(

glyphosate is in something like 70% of all grocery store items,,, this was approved and sanctified by the gov't watchdogs,,

once is happenstance,,, twice is coincidence,, three times is enemy fire

flylowgethigh · Dec 10, 2019

G.O. Joe said:
If this is domestic material, maybe the metals say something about the price and location of the grow sites being bought?

I watched a 100+ yr old farm grow CBD hemp for the first time this year. Probably had every nasty chemical farmers have used throughout history on it. Who knows where that crop went, but it was chopped up whole plant and the wet choppings dumped on a trailer.

G.O. Joe · Dec 10, 2019

flylowgethigh said:
I watched a 100+ yr old farm grow CBD hemp for the first time this year. Probably had every nasty chemical farmers have used throughout history on it.

Metals of concern historically applied by farmers is limited to lead arsenate and other forms of arsenic. This was a spot practice and only cotton gets arsenic today. If land is full of lead and/or arsenic, no one is buying it for the same price as similar but uncontaminated land. Who would buy contaminated land, regardless of the source of the contamination? I have suspicions. Isn't it hard to turn a profit in the cannabiz by doing everything on the up and up? How can anyone compete with bad actors?

OregonBorn · Dec 14, 2019

Found this scanning the hemp the news today. Seems that the outdoor Southern Oregon hemp crop was a bust this year. Up here in North Oregon it rained on and off all summer, was way cooler than normal, and the rains came early this year here. I had to move my mj crop indoors to finish them under HPS lights.

From: https://www.inquirer.com/business/w...struggle-harvest-winds-down-cbd-20191108.html

In their first year, U.S. hemp farmers struggle with bad weather, mold, inexperience

by Sophie Quinton and April Simpson, Stateline/Pew, Updated: November 8, 2019

PHOENIX, Ore. — Ajit Singh strode across his 16-acre hemp field toward a broken-down harvester. He’d been hoping all day that the mechanic now crouched beside the machine could get it back up and running. It was late October and Singh still had thousands of stinky green and purple cannabis plants across 425 acres to pick, dry and sell before winter. Like many hemp growers here in Jackson County, Oregon, he was harvesting slowly, facing a mold problem and unhappy with prices offered by potential buyers. “We want a better price,” said Singh, a soil scientist and former garden store owner — and, he said, he was prepared to hold out for one. He sold 50 acres of hemp for $70 a pound last year and now was being quoted prices less than half that.

Hemp growers nationwide scaled up this year after Congress legalized the non-intoxicating cannabis. They hoped to cash in on the booming market for cannabinoids such as wellness darling CBD, an ingredient in oils, tinctures and salves. But as harvest winds down, it’s likely that many growers will go bust. More than half a million acres were licensed for hemp production this year, though Vote Hemp, a hemp advocacy nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., estimated in September that less than half that was planted. “People went in thinking they’d be instant millionaires. But the reality is, they’re broke.” Matt Ochoa, founder Jefferson Packing House. Some of the more than 16,000 licensed growers will profit from their crops and say hemp is a better investment than traditional commodities such as corn. However, because of crop failure and other factors, Vote Hemp estimates that between 40% and half of the crop planted this year won’t be harvested.

In late October the mood was so grim in Jackson County, home to about a quarter of Oregon’s 1,957 licensed hemp growers, that rumors were swirling of husband-wife growing teams divorcing, farmers selling in a panic to low bidders and despairing entrepreneurs dying by suicide (the Jackson County Sheriff’s office told Stateline that it investigates all suicides in the county and is not aware of any involving hemp growers). “I’ve literally had a tightness in my chest from all these failures the past few days,” said Mark Taylor, founder of the Southern Oregon Hemp Co-operative, when he met with Stateline at a Medford restaurant last month. He still thinks the hemp industry has a bright future but worries that a lot of the crop planted in Oregon this year isn’t going to make it. “I believe we’ve lost a substantial amount of hemp,” he said.

Nationwide, bad weather, mold, disease, pests and inexperience have crushed some crops. Now lack of capital, harvesting equipment and drying space — challenges affecting rookie and veteran farmers alike as growing expands — means that some healthy plants may not make it out of the ground. “People can’t get it out [of the fields] because there’s not the infrastructure, the capital or the labor to get it through,” Ochoa said. Wholesale hemp prices, while higher than for other agricultural commodities, are expected to decline for key cannabinoid products this year as new suppliers flood the market, according to Washington D.C.-based cannabis industry research firm New Frontier Data. And even farmers who thought they had buyers lined up are finding there are no guarantees. Singh is optimistic that he’ll find a buyer for the crop he spent millions of dollars planting, even though much of it is blighted by mold. Moldy hemp, while less valuable than the unblemished stuff, can still be processed into CBD oil.

Other parts of the country have faced different diseases and pests. Bipolaris leaf spot, which limits the photosynthetic area of the plant, was widespread in Tennessee, said Katy Kilbourne, a plant pathologist with the state’s agriculture department. Zach Hansen, an assistant professor in the entomology and plant pathology department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has seen about 10% crop loss in worst case scenarios to another fungal disease, Southern blight. “It’s basically a death sentence for the plant,” Hansen said. Corn earworm, a common pest to sweet corn in the South, has transitioned to hemp nicely, according to experts, prompting growers to hire people to walk up and down hemp rows and hand-pick the pests off individually.

‘The Money Is in the Plants’

In Southern Oregon and other regions where hemp production exploded this year, people up and down the hemp supply chain are feeling the pressure. Ochoa is a tall man with a gentle smile who radiated calm as he walked through his 100,000-square-foot hemp-drying warehouse, fielding nonstop phone calls, video calls, emails and urgent questions from his staff. His Zen demeanor is misleading, however. “I’ve never been this stressed in my life,” he said as he headed from the curing room, a cool space where dried hemp lay in plastic-lined packing crates, to the cavernous hall where freshly harvested plants lay drying on racks. Not only was Ochoa trying to manage a rapidly growing business, but like his hemp grower clients, he was squeezed for cash. “The system is out of money,” he had explained earlier, in his bare-bones office. “The entire industry segment is all in. All the money is in the plants right now.” Ochoa said buyers are out there, but it’s hard to know who’s serious. In other parts of the country, even farmers who entered into contracts well ahead of the growing season also are having problems.

When Stateline met Michael Calebs earlier this year, he proudly wore a clean gray cap emblazoned with the green, upside-down V logo of the company that processes his hemp, Atalo Holdings. With a contract, Calebs wasn’t worried about investing $200,000 in hemp seed, clones, fertilizer, land, diesel, insurance and labor across 33 acres in London, Kentucky. In September, Atalo CEO William Hilliard sent its growers a letter alerting them that an investor had pulled out, and it could not offer a “specific or dependable date” for when growers could expect to get paid. “Matter of fact, they recommend if we can find a place to sell our crop to sell it,” said Calebs, who’s also thwarted two attempts by thieves to steal his hemp. “That’s scary, isn’t it? That could bankrupt us.” Hilliard told Stateline that Atalo continues to seek funding and intends to pay in full about 80 growers, including Calebs, who collectively this season planted about 1,700 acres in Kentucky and neighboring states. Hilliard attributed Atalo’s challenges to specific investors and outside forces, such as news of overproduction that has investors wary of getting involved, lackluster financial results among cannabis companies and uncertainty in the vaping industry. “Our enthusiasm for the hemp industry has not dampened at all,” Hilliard said.

Meanwhile, GenCanna — another heavyweight in growing and processing industrial hemp crops — is being sued by a group of hemp farmers in Kentucky over a deal that fell through to create a drying facility and pay an increased price for processed hemp. The farmers want $5 million, but GenCanna disputes their claims, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. In addition, there are at least 37 liens against a property the company leases in Mayfield, Kentucky. Records show the company owes just shy of $52 million, according to Tammy Flint, Graves County clerk.

Neighboring Tennessee licensed roughly 4,700 acres of hemp last year. This year, it’s an astounding 51,000 acres, according to the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. The number of licensed growers increased nearly 1,600% this year, from 226 to 3,800, “and that has had some catastrophic effects,” said Bill Corbin, a third-generation tobacco farmer in Springfield, Tennessee. Corbin fears he’s made a “massive mistake” by forgoing tobacco this year to grow hemp exclusively. Corbin suggests Tennessee institute a narrow window for growers to obtain licenses and restrict growers’ hemp acreage and pounds based on averages from previous years of documented production. “That should be the case with hemp, so we don’t travel this path again.”

Meanwhile, hemp prices are all over the place. Pete Gendron, president of the cannabis advocacy group Oregon SunGrowers Guild, says he’s seeing a range of prices nationally — from about $12 a pound for hemp with low cannabinoid concentrations to $1,000 a pound for top-quality flower that can be rolled into joints and smoked. Last year’s price range, he said, was also huge. Many hemp growers in southern Oregon, even experienced ones, aren’t going to be able to sell for premium prices this year, thanks to early rains that spread mold across hemp fields.

Stormmy Paul, a longtime cannabis entrepreneur who runs a hemp drying business in the area, said mold can turn a $250 a pound crop into a $25 a pound crop. Because hemp is so expensive to plant and harvest, he said, once prices drop below $20 a pound, farmers start losing money. It generally costs between $8,000 and $20,000 an acre to grow hemp, not including harvest costs, Ochoa said. Many rookie growers underestimate the expense. “People think they can grow it for $4,000 to $8,000 an acre, and then they get in,” he said, “and all they can do is keep borrowing money all the way to the finish line.”

Pushing Forward

By late October, between 75% and 90% of the viable hemp crop in Oregon should have been out of the ground and in drying barns, Gendron said. But in the Rogue Valley, a cannabis-growing mecca near the California border, hemp fields were still bursting with plants toward the end of the month. Many fields, such as Singh’s 16-acre plot, were partially harvested. “Not everything that’s sitting in the field right now is going to be harvested,” Gendron said. Singh is pushing on, despite mold, harvest challenges and the accidental fertilization of the Phoenix field by male hemp plants from a neighboring farm — which filled Singh’s once-pristine hemp flowers with seeds. He initially planned to pay field workers to hand-shuck the hemp flowers, but that proved prohibitively expensive. Mukesh Sheoran, Singh’s business partner and cousin, said that an initial crew of 100 workers for the Phoenix field put the company back $20,000 a day. Determined to cut down on labor costs, the hemp growers, both in their mid-40s, bought a green-bean harvester from a farmer in Idaho and modified it to suck up hemp leaves and flowers. Even with the machine, the harvest has proceeded slowly, because the cousins can only harvest as much hemp as they have space on the farm to dry. The harvester’s breakdown, thankfully, was short. After conferring with the mechanic, who welded adjustments to the machine in the middle of the field, Singh climbed gingerly into the cab and worked the harvester slowly round until he could drive it along a line of hemp plants. Sheoran watched silently as the harvester inched its way down the line, spitting hemp debris into a tank at the back of the machine. “We had very high hopes. See the amount of flowers we had?” he said, looking out at the top-heavy plants. “It’s all seedy.”

Even longtime farmers are facing challenges. Steve Fry, a 68-year-old organic vegetable farmer in the Rogue Valley, grew about 20 acres of hemp last year and twice as much this year. “We did so well last year that we thought we’d do more. That’s how dumb farmers are, you know,” he said, sitting on the tailgate of a truck parked beside his red barn on a glorious October afternoon. Fry estimated that he’d harvested about 15% of his hemp crop, which also has been afflicted by mold. He said he’s wondering whether it’ll be worth harvesting the most damaged plants, given the prices they’re likely to command. “I’ve got to talk to my processor guys,” he said. Next year, Fry said, he’ll be better prepared, with more drying space ready to go early in the season as well as modified harvesting machinery. And this harvest, while disappointing, won’t be crushing. Conventional crop prices are so low, he said, that even if he harvests only some hemp he’ll be better off than if he had planted vegetables. “We’re still going to do better than we would have if the whole place was in veg,” Fry said. Fry said he hasn’t made a profit on vegetables in three years. Last year’s hemp, not carrots and squash, is paying the bills on a new food processing building on his family farm. “Thank God hemp came,” Fry said.

OregonBorn · Dec 14, 2019

By the way: Is there any way to get a few seeds or clones of high CBD hemp or mj strains like Cherry or Arukah? I do not need a kilo of seeds or 1,000 plugs. 20 seeds or plugs is enough for me to do a test grow here on my acreage. I would prefer non-feminized regular seeds/plants as well. No hemp or mj farms out here. I am just a small licensed medical grower.

pipeline · Dec 14, 2019

I need cbd hemp. 50 bucks a week for me and my dogs is getting expensive. HOpefully they will allow us to grow hemp soon! They allow hemp CBD oil but you can't grow it! I am upset, I would like to produce my own hemp and have the variety that helps the most!

HEMP HEMP HOORAY! :smoke:

pipeline · Dec 14, 2019

G.O. Joe said:
Metals of concern historically applied by farmers is limited to lead arsenate and other forms of arsenic. This was a spot practice and only cotton gets arsenic today. If land is full of lead and/or arsenic, no one is buying it for the same price as similar but uncontaminated land. Who would buy contaminated land, regardless of the source of the contamination? I have suspicions. Isn't it hard to turn a profit in the cannabiz by doing everything on the up and up? How can anyone compete with bad actors?

Yeah heavy metal and pesticide testing is important. Washington's Reserve CBD Oil is tested at all stages of production for heavy metals, pesticides, and potency.

www.washingtonsreserve.com

herbgreen · Dec 14, 2019

OregonBorn said:
By the way: Is there any way to get a few seeds or clones of high CBD hemp or mj strains like Cherry or Arukah? I do not need a kilo of seeds or 1,000 plugs. 20 seeds or plugs is enough for me to do a test grow here on my acreage. I would prefer non-feminized regular seeds/plants as well. No hemp or mj farms out here. I am just a small licensed medical grower.

These guys have a couple :biggrin:

https://theunofficialgoodguys.com/products.cfm

aridbud · Dec 14, 2019

We do, too, for the home grower, wanting to make their own CBD products. It's worked out well. Haven't had to buy capsules in over a year. Hybridizing to amp up % of CBD.

Hemp as an agric crop....hit or miss depending on climate/weather/knowledge.

OregonBorn · Dec 14, 2019

herbgreen said:
These guys have a couple

https://theunofficialgoodguys.com/products.cfm

Cool beans. They have the Cherry Wine hemp strain which I am looking for. That is a high CBD strain. $12 for a 5 pack is not bad... not great, by hemp standards, but good on the marijuana scale. The thing with commercial hemp seed is that 90% of them are feminized or autos. These guys sell regular photos. Also hemp beans are almost always sold by the KILO or thousands of seeds for large sums of money, intended to be planted by the acre. The worlds remain separate... though I suppose they will merge. Some day. Maybe, as legalization has been such a long and arduous process. In geological time.

Thanks for the tip!

herbgreen · Dec 15, 2019

OregonBorn said:
Cool beans. They have the Cherry Wine hemp strain which I am looking for. That is a high CBD strain. $12 for a 5 pack is not bad... not great, by hemp standards, but good on the marijuana scale. The thing with commercial hemp seed is that 90% of them are feminized or autos. These guys sell regular photos. Also hemp beans are almost always sold by the KILO or thousands of seeds for large sums of money, intended to be planted by the acre. The worlds remain separate... though I suppose they will merge. Some day. Maybe, as legalization has been such a long and arduous process. In geological time.

Thanks for the tip!

yeah, I knew I had seen them...somehow ended up on their site again

I think they do a lot of 5pks but that could be for the one below it

You would have to email them I dont actually see a quantity but probably for 10 pk if doesnt say....

And I think they said they made a big 1000 seed order and are selling off what they dont need but you can ask where it came from

OregonBorn · Dec 15, 2019

herbgreen said:
yeah, I knew I had seen them...somehow ended up on their site again

I think they do a lot of 5pks but that could be for the one below it

You would have to email them I dont actually see a quantity but probably for 10 pk if doesnt say....

And I think they said they made a big 1000 seed order and are selling off what they dont need but you can ask where it came from

Its for a 5 pack. Cherry Wine is a fairly well known strain of hemp in these parts. I know about it and I am a Mj grower. There is a whole line of Cherry strains apparently.

herbgreen · Dec 15, 2019

yes, that must be them retailing them out in 5pks which is sort bizzarre quantity for hemp seeds

Anyway, think they are decent folks good way to get the real deal without buying a whole crop

Im sure theres a few others out there but I mysteriously ended up there and they have em :biggrin:

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