Industrial Hemp Podcast

This is a special encore edition of an interview we published on YouTube two years ago. This is my conversation with Michael Klepacz, an Ohio native and Air Force veteran who moved to Poland in 2012 and founded Natural Materials Unlimited, a company that makes textiles and products from hemp, linen and other bast fibers. In this bonus episode, he talks about how the business grew from hemp wick to...

This week on the Hemp Show, we continue our hemp adventure in Poland , catching up with American expat Michael Klepacz, owner of Natural Materials Unlimited. Klepacz sits near the end of the hemp supply chain — he doesn't grow or process raw fiber himself. Instead, he sources hemp and other natural fibers from regional mills and turns them into finished goods, from hemp wick to dog leashes, as a c...

This is part ten of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12.  Bob Hoban is an attorney and consultant in the international cannabis and hemp space, based in Denver, Colorado. He has advised governments, companies and trade organizations across multi...

This is part nine of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. View the whole series here . Lorenza Romanese is Secretary General of European Bioplastics, the Brussels-based trade association representing bio-based and biodegradable plastics across E...

This is part eight of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12.  Caroline Matthews represents Tatham, a fiber processing machinery company based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. Tatham is a 200-year-old, fifth-generation family business that sta...

This is part seven of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12.  Beau Whitney is the founder of Whitney Economics, based in Portland, Oregon. He has tracked the economics of hemp and cannabis since 2014, and his data is a fixture at industry events a...

This is part six of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12.  Julia Bialecka is CEO and co-founder of S-Lab, short for Sustainable Laboratory. The company uses hemp and mycelium to make packaging that replaces expanded polystyrene. Based in Spain, S...

This is part five of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. Colin Steddy is a grassroots farmer from Western Australia who got into hemp in 2005 after selling his farm following two droughts and a divorce. He's a no-till advocate, a carbon thinker...

This is part four of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. Jan Slaski, hemp researcher and plant breeder at InnoTech Alberta, has spent nearly a quarter-century developing industrial hemp on the Canadian prairies. He came to Canada from Poland in...

This is part three of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. Estelle Delangle, director of the Hemp European Hub in Troyes, France, frames the hemp challenge differently than most: The material isn't the problem, the world is. "The world is not re...

This is part two of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. Witold Czeszak, co-founder and head of the Polish Hemp Program at the Institute of Natural Fibers and Medical Plants, talks about Polish hemp genetics, the importance of IP protection and...

This is part one of a ten-part podcast series documenting the European Industrial Hemp Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Poznan, Poland, at the Institute of Fiber Plants and Medicinal Medicine, June 10-12. The series starts with a casual conversation with Ken Elliott and Rusty Peterson from IND HEMP in Montana about the conference itself and how it compares to hemp events back home. "The pro...

This week on the Hemp Show, Larry Smart returns to talk about Ursa Alta, the new low-THC hemp variety that Cornell AgriTech has released for commercial production. The variety has been seven years in the making. "We had come up with a new cultivar that was distinct, uniform and stable. That's our definition of a cultivar," Smart said. Ursa Alta, which means tall bear and is named for the Cornell m...

This week Morgan Tweet returns to the Hemp Show to talk about the Goodness of Hemp Act, a draft legislation she's confident will set the broader hemp industry on the path toward sensible regulation. She was on the show last November , about a week after the November surprise that we now know as the McConnell language was slipped into the appropriations bill in the eleventh hour. Tweet is the inter...

This week on the Hemp Show we meet Sully Sullivan. He's the new executive director at the National Hemp Association — and what a time to be taking the helm of a hemp association. So much is up in the air right now. What about the November federal deadline that will ban most hemp-derived THC products, from gummies and beverages to most full-spectrum CBD? Yeah, it's just sort of hanging out there, f...

This week on the Hemp Show, Claire Crunk returns. She is the founder of Trace Femcare, the worlds first hemp fiber tampon. Her first appearance on the podcast was in 2023. Her company was just a few weeks away from their initial product launch. All they were waiting for was final approval from the FDA. She assumed then that things would be easier than they ultimately turned out to be. On this epis...

This week on the show we talk with Ken Meyer of Complete Hemp Processing in Winfred, South Dakota. As of last week, Meyer is also a co-founder of Renewabuild Great Plains — the first U.S.-licensed manufacturer of structural hempcrete blocks. We've been telling the story of these structural blocks for a long time on the podcast. We  first encountered them  back in 2019 — they look like giant Lego b...

HOLTWOOD, Pa. — This week on the Hemp Podcast we take a short road trip to southern Lancaster County to catch up with farmer Steve Groff. "What we're looking at here, Eric, is a metaphor for the hemp industry. We're looking broken promises and contracts that didn't come to be," Groff said, leaning against a stack of round bales of hemp at his farm in Holtwood. Twelve hundred round bales. Four bale...

This week on the Hemp Show, we talk to Kehrt Reyher, CEO and publisher of HempToday, a leading source of global hemp news. An American expat from Indiana who has lived in Poland for more than 30 years, Reyher cut his teeth in journalism at U.S. newspapers like the Providence Journal and USA Today before moving overseas and launching a successful media company in Warsaw. Since founding HempToday in...

This week on the Hemp Show we talk to Maciej Kowalski, founder and CEO of Kombinat Konopni, a hemp company in Northern Poland. We hear how he built a vertically integrated company — from planting, harvesting, processing, all the way to manufacturing finished goods — and why he would rather control the system rather than rely on supply chains that don't fully exist. "Everyone is saying about the ne...

This week on the Hemp Show, we're talking to the guys from Dakota Hemp in Wakonda, South Dakota. John Peterson and Karll Lecher are running a HempTrain decortication system, taking in bales from local farmers and turning them into fiber and hurd. We get into how the facility works, what they're producing, and what it takes to actually run a processing plant in the Midwest. We talk about how they b...

On this week's hemp show, we talk to a couple of hemp policy advocates who recently traveled to the swamps of D.C. in hopes of affecting change. This week we're joined by Geoff Whaling, chair of the National Hemp Association, and Andrew Bish, president of the Hemp Feed Coalition. Together they represent HEMI — the Hemp Education and Marketing Initiative — which recently released its "Pushing Progr...

On this week's hemp show we're headed out to Colorado for the Industrial Hemp International Conference where hempsters from all across the value chain gathered to share ideas, make deals and be in community with one another. As a hemp podcaster, I had the unique opportunity to work in community with a couple of storytellers while I was there — Blaire Johnson and Jordan Berger — two independent fil...

We've been covering industrial hemp on the podcast for eight years now, and the story of farmers getting bad seed is so common it barely feels like news anymore. It's just accepted — low germination rates, inconsistent genetics and fields that never quite come in the way they should. But this is not OK. This is not how you grow an industry. If hemp is going to scale as a commodity crop, then it mu...

This week on the Hemp Show, we talk with Ryan Zaczynski, co-founder of 1937 International, a company working to build global supply chains for industrial hemp. In this episode, Zaczynski talks about what it takes to move hemp beyond niche markets and into real products that people use every day — by building supply chains that connect farms, textile mills and manufacturers around the world. At the...