Full disclosure: I’m a hemp farmer, but what I’m about to say is in your best interest.
If you want to grow hemp for the CBD market this summer, please don’t. Ask anyone who has grown hemp CBD extraction market in 2020 if they will grow hemp this year, and if they are, the less they will plant compared to last year.
It is not the fault of the farmer, however wonderful or abundant his harvest may be. The market is literally flooded with tons of “biomass” of hemp not sold nationwide. Bullets, bags, bins, loose plants, cut flowers, all in abundance. Lots of sellers and just one buyer in sight.
When the Farm Bill was passed in December 2018, states were quick to establish rules and regulations for farmers to plant in the summer of 2019. In 2019, four and a half times as many licenses were issued compared to the previous year. Hectares upon acres fed by new farmers betting on getting the high prices previously earned by cannabis growers in Colorado and Oregon.
Hemp farmers focused on the CBD in the market and grew too much in 2019. Prices dropped considerably (duh). Everyone thought that demand would catch up with supply. But it was not so.
So what did the farmers do? They planted more CBD-healthy hemp in 2020. It is estimated that 85-90% of the hemp grown last year was for CBD market. And, of course, prices went down again.
Fewer farmers will apply for hemp licenses in 2021 as prices continue to fall. Meanwhile, the seed companies have been sending me emails with basement sale prices at good prices for weeks. It looks like CBD the seed market is stagnant these days. More evidence than the CBD the market has stagnated.
Hemp is not synonymous with CBD
In the green rush to grow hemp, people have confused “hemp” as a synonym for “CBDBefore Sanjay Gupta introduced Charlotte Figge to the World (2013), the hemp movement was about food, fuel, and fiber. But today WE farmers do not grow too much hemp for these markets.
If you drink hemp milk, eat hemp granola, or enjoy a hemp burger, these foods are likely to come from hemp grain grown in Canada. So if Americans are really migrating to plant foods, why aren’t more American farmers growing hemp as a grain crop? Hemp growers, listen?
And what about hemp cement? Have you seen them at Lowe’s or Home Depot? Everyone talks about it, but the shops don’t sell it.
There are many bases to be made to convert the stream into hemp cement. Architects and builders need to be familiar with it. Construction codes must adopt it. And when it becomes a regular building material, it’s enough to supply Lowe’s. Hemp cultivation will have to increase to large volumes to serve this market. Do hemp growers listen?
Will there really be a market for fiber hemp? This is my third year writing a monthly column on hemp. My February column on hemp packaging i have received more comments than all my other columns put together. Hemp toilet paper may not be a priority right now, but Amazon boxes may.
Amazon’s shipping containers have to be made with hemp and Jeff Bezos is rich enough to subsidize the hemp industry to achieve this. He could go a long way to wasting his image. Trees are sacred and hemp is a favorable alternative to the land. Do hemp growers listen?
No shelf life for fiber hemp
I don’t try to scare hemp farmers away. But hemp growing for the saturated CBD market does not make much sense, even more so with a flood of synthetic and economic products CBD insulated made of yeast substrate at the outlet.
Although the cultivation of hemp for the small but growing fiber market is speculative in the short term, keep this in mind: there is no shelf life for hemp fiber. Grow the right cultivars on tall plants with long fiber. Store them in a dry building and they will last until the market can catch you up to date. And he will.
Right now the hemp derivative CBD the market is besieged by a supply in excess of demand. In the case of hemp fiber, the opposite happens. In the not-too-distant future, the demand for hemp fiber will exceed supply. Hemp growers, listen?
Jerry Whiting, a long project CBD collaborator, writes a monthly hemp column for NWLeaf from which This article is adapted.
Copyright, project CBD. Cannot reprint without permission.
