Industrial Hemp Podcast

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...

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...

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...

  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 wi...

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 p...

On this week's Hemp Podcast, we talk to Guy Carpenter, founder of Bear Fiber in North Carolina, where he is spinning a blend of hemp and cotton into yarn and making garments like hats, shirts, and socks. "The vision was to incorporate sustainability and longevity into people's lifestyle," he said. Bear Fiber developed proprietary methods to produce cottonized hemp fiber, and is making connections...

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 bedd...

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 assis...

On this week's hemp podcast, we listen to a panel discussion from the NoCo Hemp Expo that took place in Colorado earlier this month. The panelists were Rachel Berry, a farmer and founder of the Illinois Hemp Growers Association; Terry Moran, a sales rep from Kanda Hemp, an importer of Asian hemp varieties; Corbett Miteff from KonopiUS, an importer of European hemp genetics; and Larry Smart, a gene...

On this 420 Bonus show, we share an episode of one of our favorite podcasts, Rumble Strip . It's made by Erica Heilman who tells stories of rural Vermont. On this episode she interviews Vermonter John Rodgers, a stonemason the Northeast Kingdom, where he also runs a construction business, plows driveways and rents properties, and for sixteen years he served in the Vermont Legislature in both the H...

This week's hemp podcast is a recap of the 10th annual  NoCo Hemp Expo  in Estes Park, Colorado, April 11-13, where industry stakeholders gathered to collaborate, commiserate and celebrate the state of hemp in 2024. The episode features voices from many attendees, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis. "We're really all hands on deck to make sure Colorado continues to be an ag powerhouse, and hemp i...

On this week's hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming talks to Steve Groff from Cedar Meadow Farm in Holtwood, Lancaster County, where he is getting ready to plant 70 acres of industrial hemp. "This year it's all fiber. And we'll probably plant about 10 varieties," Groff said. Of those 10, about a third will be what he calls his "core varieties" that have performed well previously on his farm or in the M...

On this bonus episode we talk to Andrew Bish and Morgan Tweet from the Hemp Feed Coalition, the advocacy group that has been working for four years to get hemp grain approved as a livestock feed. Opening up the feed markets is the one of the most important issues in the hemp industry today. Hemp grain was given tentative approval by AAFCO in January, with a final vote in August. On this episode th...

In this week's hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming speaks with Ken Meyer, beekeeper and hemp processor from South Dakota. Meyer and his family run a fourth-generation beekeeping business as well as the state's first industrial hemp processing facility. As a young man, Meyer enjoyed beekeeping but was encouraged by his elders to get an education instead of going into the family business, which he did,...

On this bonus episode of the Hemp Podcast, we talk to Mike Mercadante from Right Coast Hemp in Manahawkin, New Jersey, where the company is holding the first of a series of hands-on hempcrete work shops, May 10-12. The workshops are intended to give local builders and contractors a chance to get to know hemp as a material and see how the hempcrete process works. Learn more about Right Coast Hemp h...

This week's podcast guest Mattie Mead competed in a 2013 pitch competition at Hobart College in Geneva, New York. He had just shared his vision for a company that made building materials out of hemp. "One of the judges for the contest said, 'So let me get this straight, you're looking to build houses out of a Schedule 1 substance?' "And I said, well, 'Yes.' "Today it's a Schedule 1 substance, but...

  Hemp Podcast guest James "Jimmy" Cottrell II is a fourth-generation paper maker at family-owned Cottrell Paper in Saratoga County, New York. He started cutting the grass in high school and began working at the mill after graduation, and has worked his way up. Today he is director of maintenance for the mill and vice president of Mill26, Cottrell Paper's hemp paper brand. The company was founded...

This is a special weekend edition of the Hemp Podcast. Lancaster Farming speaks with Geoff Whaling, chair of the National Hemp Association. I will update the details of this episode soon. For now, enjoy the audio. Learn more: National Hemp Association https://nationalhempassociation.org/   Thanks to our sponsors! IND HEMP https://indhemp.com/ Americhanvre https://americhanvre.com/ Forever Green, d...

Jean Lotus is an award-winning investigative journalist and publisher of HempBuild Magazine . She is based in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she has been covering the hemp industry since 2017, and is our guest on this week's hemp podcast. While she has written about various sectors of the hemp industry, her main area of interest is the hemp building sector. "I thought, jeez, this is a technology th...

This week on the Hemp Podcast, Lancaster Farming talks with Maciej Kowalski, founder and CEO of  Kombinat Konopny , a hemp company based in Elbląg, a Polish city on the Baltic Sea. Kombinat Konopny is a vertically integrated hemp operator working both in the herbal and fiber division. Kowalski said the company takes a no-nonsense approach to floral production and extraction. "Which means basically...

This week's hemp podcast is divided into two parts. Lancaster Farming talks with Shannon Powers from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture about some major changes to the hemp program in the Keystone State. "The first is that Pennsylvania is moving to a performance-based testing system for growers who are growing either for fiber or grain," Powers said. Performance-based testing, she said, wi...

This week's podcast guest is Robert Hoban, a cannabis attorney and industry leader. Hoban recently published a five-part series at Forbes.com in which he takes a deep dive on some of the most controversial issues in the hemp industry today. Hoban has had a full-spectrum cannabis career, having worked extensively on both sides of the marijuana/hemp divide. A few years before the 2014 Farm Bill open...

This week's hemp podcast guest is Patrick Atagi, president and CEO of the National Industrial Hemp Council of America (NIHC), a DC-based organization that advocates for and lobbies on behalf of the hemp industry. ON this episode, Atagi discusses industry priorities for the next Farm Bill and the work the NIHC is doing to put hemp on a level playing field with other commodities in the eyes of the U...

This week on the industrial hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming talks with Scott Evans, executive vice president of Panda Biotech, a Dallas-based company whose High Plains Hemp Gin in Wichita Falls will be one of the largest hemp processing facilities in the world when it opens this year. Evans said the processing technology comes from Europe and has a throughput of 10 metric tons per hour. As you mig...

The Industrial Hemp Podcast is back after a short break. Episode one of Season Four is available now. The theme of this episode is Good News, because there seems to be a fair amount of it these days in the hemp space. One such piece of positivity comes to us from podcast guest Morgan Tweet, executive director of the Hemp Feed Coalition , a nonprofit organization working to gain federal approval fo...