Industrial Hemp Podcast

Season 4 of the Industrial Hemp Podcast will be starting up soon, and this brief message is sort of like a teaser for the new season. Have questions, comments or concerns? I'd love to hear from you: podcast@lancasterfarming.com . Thanks!  

We're taking the show on the road again. This week we'll hear interviews from my recent trip to Massachusetts, where I visited the Cape Cod Hemp House in Harwich, and the Hillside Center for Sustainable Living in Newburyport. Michael Monteiro gave me a tour of his newly built 6,000-square-foot house. "It may look like any other house here on the cape. We have cedar sidewall shingles on the house,"...

This weeks' show is sort of mixed bag. I've got a few nuggets of hemp news, a few updates, a trailer for a new Lancaster Farming podcast called The Farm House, and an in-person interview with hempcrete builder Cameron McIntosh. Sorry for the lack of details on this episode, but I'm trying to get everything done before i hit the road a mini hemp tour to Massachusetts. Americhanvre Cast-Hemp https:/...

On this week's show, we talk with Morris Beegle, founder of the Noco Hemp Expo, the largest industrial hemp convention in North America. The tenth annual expo will be held April 11-13 in Estes Park, Colorado. "It's really a beautiful mountain resort location where we can get 2,000-3,000 people up there and basically take over the town," Beegle said. He expects it to be a good meet-up, full of cons...

This week on the hemp podcast we talk with Erica Stark, chair of the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council, a nonprofit seeking to accelerate the return of hemp to Pennsylvania's agriculture landscape. Earlier this year, PAHIC received over $200,000 in grant money from the state ag department to attract capital investment with a program called Invest in PA Hemp. Last month, the organization released...

On this week's hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming talks with Cole Gibbs and Adam Dietrich from Colorado-based Dama BioPlastics. The company specializes in biomaterials and bioplastics made from upcycled agricultural plant waste, including industrial hemp which is abundant in Colorado's flourishing hemp and cannabis industries. Dietrich, Dama's director of material science, said they're not using indu...

Hemp has played a role in the lives of humans for a very long time, according to this week's podcast guest, Jeremy Klettke, cannabis breeder and owner of Davis Farms, based in Oregon and Massachusetts. "It's clearly culturally assimilated with us. It's clearly evolved with us," he said, "when you talk about it from an endogenous cannabinoid perspective." "Whatever we ask for, the plant seems to gi...

This week on the podcast we talk to Robin Destiche and Corbett Miteff, two founding partners of KonopiUS, a company that sells seeds and consulting services. KonopiUS specializes in seeds from Europe, importing genetics that work best for North America. Miteff said the company is a conglomerate of three other businesses that were exporting European genetics to the U.S. We "decided to kind of quit...

The fledgling U.S. hemp industry is decades behind countries like Canada, France and China, but according to impact investor and this week's podcast guest, Pierre Berard, it could flourish into a $2.2 billion industry by 2030 and create thousands of jobs. To reach its potential, what the hemp industry needs most right now, Berard said, is capital investment. Last month, Berard published a report t...

Inflammation occurs naturally in horses and is often part an animal's healing response, but chronic, low-grade inflammation is a contributing factor in diseases that affect the health of horses, according to this week's podcast guest, Kristine Ely. Last month, Ely defended her doctoral thesis at Virginia Tech, where she conducted a study to determine the effect hemp seed oil would have on inflamma...

On this episode we talk to David Suchoff, alternative crops professor and Extension specialist at North Carolina State University, about hemp at NC State and the research he oversees as leader of the Alternative Crops program and as the director of the Hemp Research Consortium.  We talk about hemp in the South and why hemp for textiles makes sense in North Carolina and how his time in the Peace Co...

This week on the podcast, Lancaster Farming talks to Abner Johnson, chief operating officer at Pure Shenandoah, a Virginia-based, family-owned hemp company that has built a successful CBD brand while simultaneously going all in on fiber and hurd. Johnson and several of his siblings operate a full-spectrum hemp facility in the Shenandoah Valley. They process cannabinoids using CO2 extraction while...

On this week's Hemp Podcast, Lancaster Farming talks to Saharah Moon Chapotin, executive director of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR). the Foundation was established in the 20124 Farm Bill "We were given the unique mandate by Congress to form public private partnerships to support food and agriculture research," she said, "really recognizing the dearth of or the decreasing a...

On this week's podcast we talk to Oregon-based hemp lobbyist and legal strategist Courtney Moran, who was in Washington, D.C., last week "lobbying for support for the Industrial Hemp Act." The Industrial Hemp Act of 2023, also known as the Hemp Exemption, would create a new legal definition of hemp grown for fiber and grain, separating those sectors from hemp grown for flower or cannabinoids. Advo...

On this week's podcast, we talk to Andy Bennett, founder of Hart Hemp Co., the first commercial-scale industrial hemp producer in the Old Line State. "We're starting as a grassroots organization, putting some industrial hemp in the ground here in the state of Maryland," Bennett said. "On a commercial scale, it's never been done." He said the company is growing several different varieties and exper...

On this week's hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming talks to cover crop coach Steve Groff, who was hoping to get one of those multilevel pull-behind sickle bar mowers to cut his hemp this year. But those machines are in demand and he wasn't able to get one in time, so he did the best he could. "What we did this year," he said, "is just farmer innovation." He had his local machine shop mount a sickle ba...

This week on the Hemp Podcast we shift gears a little bit and talk about flax. We go to Kneehigh Farm to meet Pennsylvania Flax Project founders Heidi Barr and Emma de Long who hosted a flax harvest educational event last week in Chester County, Pa. Heidi Barr wants you to know that flax is linen and linen is flax. A fiber artist based in Philadelphia, Barr co-founded the Pennsylvania Flax Project...

This week's podcast is a follow-up to a story we brought to you in April about the Lower Sioux Indian Community in Morton, Minnesota, where members of the tribe have been busy this summer building with hempcrete. With special permission, we share with you the first episode of the JD Experience, a podcast made by 12-year-old Jesse Desjarlais, who interviews two members of his tribe who have been bu...

This week we're on the road, from Ag Progress Days to Brush Mountain Bison, then to the Old Fiddler's Picnic and hemp field days at King's AgriSeeds and Penn State's research farm. This is a meandering episode. Buckle up and hold on tight. First we talk to Ag Progress Days attendee John Borders, an 83year old who just wanted to sit on a bench. Then we travel to Brush Mountain to visit with Herb Gr...

This week on the podcast, we talk to Jay Burstein, a luthier in Vermont who makes guitars from industrial hemp. His company is called Hemptone Music and specializes in fine-crafted hemp instruments. On this episode, Burstein talks about his process of making the guitars and the journey he's undertaken to improve his production methods. Burstein was first on the podcast in early 2019. Back then he...

This week on the Hemp Podcast, we talk to Sandra Marquardt, fiber crops manager at Textile Exchange, a global nonprofit that works with textile brands, manufacturers and farmers around the world to guide the industry toward purposeful production methods and sustainability goals. Marquardt is based outside of Washington, D.C., and said Textile Exchange has about 140 employees working in 30 countrie...

What was the Montana Hemp Summit all about? Depends on who you ask. This episode was made on location in Fort Benton and Great Falls, Montana, and a few airports along the way home back to Pennsylvania. I will update this page with a list of the people I interviewed, but now I'm home and happy to be here and grateful to have gone to Montana to witness the event. -=-=-=- On this episode you will he...

This week on the Hemp Podcast, Lancaster Farming reconnects with Alyssa Collins, associate research professor at Penn State and the director of the university's Southeast Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Manheim, Lancaster County, where she oversees hemp production and research trials. Penn State Extension's mission is to deliver science-based information to people, businesses and com...

This week on the hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming catches up with recent Cornell grad Owen Deitcher, who is on the road this summer to visit hemp farmers and processors around the country. The reason he's making this trip, he said, is to understand where the industry is at the moment, who the main players are and what challenges they face. Deitcher sees a disconnect in the minds of the public and w...

On this week's hemp podcast, we talk to Dalton Wittmer, agronomist at IND Hemp, a hemp processing company based in Fort Benton, Montana. Growing up and working on a farm in southern Indiana and graduating from Purdue University's agronomy program, Wittmer has been chin deep in agriculture his whole life. "I worked on a farm since I was 12 and just been around livestock — cattle, pigs, a little bit...