23% of Vegetable Growers Interested in Producing Hemp

There is perhaps no crop in global agriculture as polarizing as hemp is right now. Photo by Marcia O’Connor. 

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Following decades of prohibition and a life in relative obscurity as a research-only crop in the U.S., the 2018 Farm Bill legalized industrial hemp.  

The industry literally went from zero to sixty overnight, transitioning from a handful of R&D acres across parts of Oregon, Colorado, Kentucky, and North Carolinato upwards of 500,000 acres planted nationwide in 2019.  

Then, the bottom literally fell right out from under hemp farmers. CBD futures prices, both for plant biomass as well as finished oil product, declined precipitously in Q4. Cheaper CBD imports from Europe and Asia made domestically produced product less appealing to the small number of active buyers in the market at that point.

Many growers struggled to even get the plants out of the fields and into processing as the hand labor required to harvest acres upon acres of stout, hardy hemp plants proved a major management issue to overcome.   

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2020 American Vegetable Grower’s State of the Industry Survey Data

Coming off such a turbulent year, it made sense to ask our audience about hemp planting intentions for 2020.

What else did the 2020 State of the Industry Survey Show?  

Out of 437 responses, a robust 77% of respondents  said they had no intention of planting the crop in 2020, with only 19% indicating planting hemp was “under consideration” for the season. A paltry 4% committed to growing the crop. 

Digging a bit deeper, we asked what concerns them most about growing hemp.

The most common reasoning given, at 43%, was that it’s an underdeveloped market.  

Another aspect of hemp production that potentially scared off some growers is the current patchwork of state and tribal production program regulations governing production. There’s currently no federal, all encompassing regulatory framework in place like virtually all other ag crops. Thirty-four percent of growers cited this as a non-starter for them when it comes to growing hemp in 2020.  

Several growers wrote in their answers — a full 28% of those responding did so. The overarching theme among the responses? That the hemp market is currently quite unstable, while the vegetable market is in comparison pretty stable, and revenue projections are up. 

We should note growers answered the survey throughout the month of March and during the first half of April 2020. That’s just as the pandemic’s shutdowns began. 

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