Michigan Growers Are Excited About the Potential of Industrial Hemp

In partnership with: Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural Development

A historically significant crop is making a comeback after being banished from American fields for decades. One of the most versatile crops around, hemp can be used to make fuel, food, building materials, fabric, paper and many other products.

When Nate Wittkamp started growing hemp in 2019, he went all in: purchasing expensive seed, hiring workers, applying weed control and treating it like a high-value crop. The experience helped him understand that hemp should be treated less like a vegetable crop and more like the other commodities he grows on his farm in Mears.

This season, Wittkamp purchased less expensive seed, direct-seeded the crop and ignored the weeds – and still produced a crop with a percentage of cannabidiol (or CBD) that processors wanted. He suspects growers will need to continue making adjustments as the market for industrial hemp changes.

“Once the grain and fiber markets take off, growers can harvest seeds and send them to grain purchasers and sell leftover stalks for fiber after the flowers have been taken off for CBD oil,” he explains. “We’ll see more of a switch to growers trying to get the most out of the crop.”

See more: 5 Fun Facts About Hemp

Hemp, once an important crop in the United States, started disappearing from the landscape after the Marihuana Tax Act passed in 1937. Recent changes to the U.S. Farm Bill helped hemp experience a resurgence as an agricultural product.

The 2014 Farm Bill allowed universities and state departments of agriculture to launch pilot programs to research industrial hemp. Four years later, the 2018 Farm Bill allowed states to submit applications for regulatory authority to allow farmers to grow hemp in their states.

Starting in 2019, the Michigan Industrial Hemp Research and Development Act established a licensing program that allowed the growing, processing and handling of industrial hemp – and farmers were eager to get started.

“Traditional growers of row crops like corn, wheat, and soy and Michigan specialty crops like cherries were interested in hemp as a new revenue stream,” explains Gina Alessandri, industrial hemp program director for the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD). “It also attracted a lot of interest from folks who haven’t been farming but saw potential in hemp.”

Between 2019 and 2020, MDARD issued more than 500 licenses to grow hemp with a total of 15,000 acres permitted for industrial hemp (though not all of those acres are in production). Most farmers are growing hemp for the CBD market.

Cultivating New Opportunities

Despite the excitement surrounding industrial hemp, Alessandri notes the crop isn’t for the faint of heart. Strict limits on the amount of tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, the component in cannabis that creates the “high” associated with marijuana, require farmers to monitor their crops closely.

“Crops that go ‘hot’ are out of compliance and have to be destroyed,” Alessandri says. “If growers aren’t careful, they could lose their investment.”

Growing a compliant crop is not the only challenge. Wittkamp notes that while growers are still learning how to grow and manage the crop, prices were lower than anticipated, access to qualified processors is limited and markets are hard to find.

“You can grow as much corn as you want and you’ll be able to sell it, but hemp is a specialty crop and you need a (buyer) for it,” he says. “If you start harvesting it and don’t have a buyer, you’ll continuously try to sell it cheaper just to get it moved, and that drives the price down.”

As part of a “course correction,” Wittkamp scaled back his hemp production from 215 acres in 2019 to 50 acres in 2020. He’ll continue to sell the biomass from this harvest for cannabidiol and hopes that the grain and fiber markets will mature, providing more outlets for farmers to sell industrial hemp.

“It’s a new market and we’re all on a learning curve,” he adds. “It’s a lot of trial and error. There are no right answers about how to do things, but how many times in history do we have a crop given back to us and the chance to figure it out? It’s a great opportunity.”