How I accidentally became a hemp farmer

By Andrew Mefferd

I was not planning on growing hemp this year, but when an opportunity fell into my lap I decided to take the plunge. Now that growing hemp is legal in all 50 states, I figure I must not be the only GFM reader trying it this year.

I don’t know how it is in your area, but every time I turn around I hear about another grower trying hemp. Though I just read the other day that my county of Somerset has the largest hemp acreage of any in Maine.

Is hemp a good opportunity for market farmers, or a distraction from growing flowers and vegetables? I had been thinking about this question this past winter. And when the opportunity to actually grow some presented itself, I figured there was no better way to find out than to try it. We had to decide whether to even cover it in GFM, since we usually stick to the topics of vegetable, flower and herb growing. While trying to determine the appropriateness for GFM, we asked ourselves: does hemp plug easily into the systems already established on market farms? Can it augment income and viability on market farms?

In the end we decided it’s relevant because if you can grow vegetables and flowers, you can grow hemp. The fact that hemp can easily plug into established systems on vegetable and flower farms makes it at least worth a look.
How lucrative hemp will actually be has yet to be seen.

At first glance, the numbers look pretty good. We’ve been quoted in the range of $25/pound for bulk dried hemp, with yields of at least a pound a plant and roughly 3,000 plants per acre, it’s a crop that could end up grossing $75,000 per acre or more. But of course, the devil is in the details, including how much it costs to plant, and whether that kind of price will survive once everyone and their cousin starts growing it. 

One of the reasons I decided to grow a quarter acre is because I realized that, with my existing farm infrastructure, I didn’t have to buy anything new to grow it besides seeds and fertilizer. Hemp is an annual that can be grown much like a tomato or other large bushy plant, and for medicinal use what is most valuable is the flower. There are even people putting hemp flowers into bouquets. So, we figured whether readers are flower or vegetable growers or both, they probably already have the skills and tools to grow it.

I am talking specifically about hemp grown for extraction of essential oils here. Though there are a lot of potential uses for hemp, and I believe there are exciting opportunities for production of hemp as a fiber and edible seed crop, I do not think growing for fiber or seed is a natural step that most market growers are going to make. The lower price per pound and need to handle large amounts of material make hemp for fiber and edible seed an agronomic row crop more like corn or cotton.

Legal status
Hemp is a new opportunity for most growers because it was hard to grow legally in the United States until the signing of the 2018 farm bill in December of last year decriminalized growing hemp. Since what the farm bill is calling “industrial hemp” is the same plant species as marijuana, both plants had been treated as a drug and were both illegal to grow at the federal level until now. That is despite the fact that hemp does not have enough of the chemical tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to have a psychoactive effect. Presumably the logic was that since there is no way to look at a plant and tell if it is hemp or marijuana, the easiest thing was just to make everything illegal, regardless of whether the plant had psychoactive properties or not.

Specifically, cannabis plants with less than .3% THC on a dry weight basis are considered hemp and now federally legal to grow. Cannabis plants with THC levels over .3% are considered “marijuana” and still federally illegal, though most states have legalized some type of medical marijuana and eleven have legalized recreational use.

There are a lot of other compounds in the cannabis plant in addition to THC. The one that has gained the most attention lately is cannabidiol (CBD), which I hadn’t heard of until a year or so ago but now I can’t walk into a gas station without seeing a plethora of CBD related products. I probably would have found them sooner, except I am lucky enough to not have the kind of pain and other chronic complaints that causes many to seek out CBD products.

The hemp we are growing will be processed into tinctures, salves and other preparations which people are using to help with pain, anxiety, insomnia, seizures and a host of other maladies. Unfortunately there is very little clinical research on CBD. It was difficult to study it while it was illegal. So, most hemp products are sold as supplements, which are not regulated by the FDA.

A last-minute decision
I knew there were people in my area legally growing hemp under the provisions of the 2014 Farm Bill, but I hadn’t given the crop much thought until this spring. A nearby farmer who had already been growing hemp for a number of years and processing it into tinctures wasn’t able to grow it anymore. He asked a friend of mine if we’d be interested in growing it for him.

We started thinking about this in the middle of March of this year, and since the hemp license application window closed at the end of March, we had to decide pretty quickly whether we wanted to do it or not. After looking into it, we thought it would be interesting to try, and likely lucrative enough that we would at the very least make our money back.

Our hemp crop looks just like a field of marijuana, though you could smoke the whole thing and not get high because there is almost no THC in it. So, how our state of Maine tells the difference is by licensing. Everyone who wants to grow hemp in the state has to apply for a license.

We applied for one just before the deadline and got it pretty quickly. Basically, we had to tell them where we proposed to grow the hemp and get the seeds from, so they could come inspect it and test it and make sure we aren’t starting a marijuana farm and calling it a hemp farm. We will have a site visit soon where they come see that the crop has been planted, and then they will come back and take samples and test them to make sure they are as low in THC as we think they are. Once they verify that, we should be able to sell our crop.

Though at first glance the gross per acre looks pretty good, I am worried that small growers will get outcompeted in the long run by large growers who can take advantage of economies of scale to offer a lower price. Since we are only planting ¼ acre this year (we are aware of others in our area planting many times more), we are trying to remain competitive though two strategies.

The first strategy is to get our crop certified. I would say certified organic, as the rest of our production is, but in this case the regulations have not caught up to what’s happening on the ground yet. Because hemp hasn’t been added to the list of crops with certified organic practices yet, and probably won’t until this fall, we can’t go the certified organic route.

So, to keep up with the times, our certifier, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) Certification Services created a program called the MOFGA Certified Clean Cannabis Program (MC3). Basically, all the same regulations that apply to our organic vegetable and seedling production will apply to the hemp, we will just get the MC3 certification for our hemp until such time as it is added to the list of crops that can be certified organic.

In fact, we signed a contract for our hemp crop, which we hope provides a sense of security for our customer as well as us. For us, it locks in a price that is above the commodity pricing. And a condition of the contract is that we get it MC3 certified, as an important part of their branding is that it is certified. So hopefully the will give everyone piece of mind; that we will get a better-than-average price for our conscientiously grown crop, and our customer will get certified healthy and chemical-free plant material to make into medicine.

The terms of our contract are to sell 100-250# of hemp, with a sliding scale of value based on CBD percent. It is understood that if our crop is higher in CBD they will need to buy less of it, but we will get paid more by the pound. The assumption is that our crop will test out somewhere between a minimum of 5% and a maximum of 15% CBD content. The price per pound of a 5% crop would be $75, the price per pound for a 15% CBD crop would be $140, with a difference of 5-6 dollars/pound between different grades. For example, we will get $100/# for an 8% crop, $123/# for a 12% crop, etc.

Read about our other strategies for staying competitive as a small hemp grower, and how we adapted no-till practices to the crop, in the continuation of this article in the September issue of GFM.

Andrew Mefferd is the Editor of Growing for Market. He farms in Maine.