Interest in growing hemp grows quickly
Interest in industrial hemp grew like a weed in Oklahoma this year.
State agricultural officials said t his week 351 growers obtained l i censes this year through Oklahoma's researchbased pilot program, compared to just 28 the previous year.
Those growers, they said, aimed to plant the crop on 21,340 acres in 2019, compared to just 445 acres the previous year.
They also planned to grow the crop using 324,202 square feet of space inside greenhouses or other growing facilities, compared to the 80,000 square feet of inside space licensed for growth in 2018.
Officials said the explosive growth in interest is tied both to current economic conditions, where growers are looking for crops with a better cash return than wheat, and to expectations they will be able to grow industrial hemp starting next year with f ar fewer hassles than they experience today.
“The reality is, people are trying something different,” said Kenny Naylor, food safety and consumer protection services director at Oklahoma's Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry.
Oklahoma created its research-based pilot program after Congress approved the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018.
The federal law removed industrial hemp from the Schedule 1 category of the Controlled Substances Act, authorized crop insurance programs for industrial hemp growers and allowed for hemp clones and seedlings to cross state lines. President Donald Trump signed the bill into law in early January.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been busy
si nce working on proposed rules to regulate the industry.
Naylor said he expects the federal government to issue proposed rules for public comment in about a month, with hopes those will be finalized before the end of this year.
That, he said, would enable his agency to set state-level rules growers would be required to follow in 2020.
“It i s hard when you don't know exactly what direction they are going, on some things. The proposed rules will at least give us an
idea,” he said.
“We have been promised we will have, at a minimum, temporary rules we will be underneath in 2020."
The crop's growth cycle mirrors that of corn, with planting typically running from March through May and harvests in September and October.
Growers cultivating the crop this year are operating under the rules Oklahoma law created for its pilot program, meaning they were required to work with eight Oklahoma universities and colleges that have plant science curricula to
obtain their licenses.
Nay lo rs aid harvest estimates on this year's crop are not yet available, given that some growers either couldn't plant or lost their crops to Oklahoma's unusually wet spring and early summer and because of drought-like conditions that have persisted since that may have impacted growth rates.
“I was expecting to see some pretty tall growth” among planted fields this year, Naylor said. “That's not to say there isn't some out there, I just haven't seen it.”