Secretary Russell Redding made an official Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture trip to Montana this week to meet with founders of IND HEMP, one of the largest hemp fiber and seed processors in the U.S.

On this week’s podcast, Lancaster Farming catches up with Redding as he visits the hemp facility in Fort Benton, Montana. The show features a joint interview with Redding and IND HEMP founder Ken Elliott from the IND HEMP office.

Redding said he originally planned to attend the Montana Hemp Summit, hosted by IND HEMP, in Great Falls later this month, but had a commitment in Pennsylvania he could not cancel.

Wanting to see the oil seed and fiber processing facilities with his own two eyes to better understand what is needed back home in Pennsylvania, he scheduled a last-minute trip to Big Sky Country.

The fact-finding trip is part of a larger commitment from his department to develop a robust hemp industry in Pennsylvania, where, so far, the industry has struggled to find capital to build out the processing infrastructure.

Redding spent the day with IND HEMP founders Morgan Tweet and Ken and Julie Elliott who answered his questions and gave him a tour of both the oil-seed facility and the fiber-processing facility, housed in separate facilities on IND HEMP’s campus in Fort Benton, a town along the Missouri River in north-central Montana with a population of around 1,400.

IND HEMP has created just over 50 jobs since setting up the facility in 2019.

Redding is returning home with a new perspective.

“I think in Pennsylvania, having something that would look like what is happening here in Montana is exactly what everybody in the steering committee and the hemp engine is trying to do, but it’s not the final answer,” Redding said.

“What I’ve learned today is that there’s a quest to just keep building out the marketplace,” he said.

“And the economics of that marketplace then determine sort of what those income streams look like for both the company and the farms,” he said.

Elliott is optimistic about the Keystone State’s potential in the burgeoning hemp industry, partially because of Pennsylvania’s reputation for hemp in colonial times. He was keynote speaker at the Pennsylvania Hemp Summit in Harrisburg November 2022 and has since gotten to know key players in Pennsylvania’s hemp industry.

“We can help you guys take that next step,” he said. “We would love to be part of whatever the solution is for Pennsylvania’s the hemp industry.”

Do Pennsylvania farmers even have an appetite for hemp, after the boom and bust of the CBD market along with recent controversies surrounding so-called hemp-derived intoxicants like Delta 8?

Redding thinks Pennsylvania have an appetite for something big and boring that can be another revenue stream for producers.

“The margins, whether you’re in Montana or Pennsylvania, are thin,” Redding said.

“So to whatever extent we can add diversity to it — you can help de-risk the operation by adding an enterprise — that’s universal.”

Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture Hemp Program

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On this week’s Hemp Podcast, we talk to Geoff Whaling from the National Hemp Association, who recently returned from a trip to Africa.

The trip, funded by a USDA Emerging Markets Program grant, focused on developing hemp exports to Malawi, Rwanda and Ghana.

The purpose of the trip, Whaling said, “was to undertake a review and to report back to USDA as to the barriers for exporting American grown hemp products into those three countries.”

In Malawi, he met with government officials, including President Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, who Whaling said was impressed with the economic potential of hemp in improving food security and creating industry.

One of the barriers Whaling found is that hemp is not on the World Food Program and USAID’s ingredients list.

That exclusion will hinder the export of hemp-based nutritional products from the U.S. to Africa, Whaling said.

Whaling also talks about the Lancaster County Hemp Circuit that took place last month. Whaling was instrumental in bringing Betsy Londrigan, the administrator of USDA’s Rural Business-Cooperative Service, to the event.

Whaling said her presence at the circuit signaled USDA’s interest in supporting the hemp industry, with potentially billions of dollars of funding available to the industry through Rural Development programs that Londrigan oversees.

Also on this week’s show, we follow up on that white deer Steve Groff saw on his way to the Cornell Hemp Field Day.

As you might have guessed, there’s more to the story.

A lot more.

An Army base. Nuclear warheads. An encampment of protesting women. A fence. A herd of inbred deer.

Who knew one white doe would be such a can of worms.

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King's Agriseeds

On the latest episode of the Hemp Podcast, we take the show on the road once more — this time to Cornell University’s Hemp Fiber and Grain Field Day at the Agritech Campus in Geneva, New York.

Among the many voices on this episode is Christine Smart, director of Cornell Agritech, who’s leading groundbreaking work on hemp diseases and crop resilience.

Hailee Greene, a recent Cornell MBA grad and founder of GreeneAcres Processing, talks about her ambitious plans to establish the first full-scale hemp-processing facility in New York, despite the financial challenges that lie ahead.

“We’re a couple million dollars away, which is probably the story of everybody that says they want to do processing at this point,” she said.

I also spoke with Maciej Kowalski, a Polish hemp entrepreneur who just wrapped up a trip around the U.S. to learn more about hemp processing.

He highlighted the disconnect he sees in the U.S. between farmers and textile manufacturers, stressing that fiber quality must start in the field.

“The textile people don’t care about what’s happening in the field, and the cultivators don’t care about what happens afterward. That’s not the way to make a good product,” he said.

Shelby Ellison, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is working to collect and preserve feral hemp genetics from across the U.S., preserving the genetic diversity of hemp, which can be used to breed more resilient and adaptive varieties.

So far, she and her team have collected more than 1,500 individual plant samples across 14 different states in the U.S.

Pennsylvania hempcrete builder Cameron McIntosh talks about the growing interest from federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, in addressing not only operational emissions but also the embodied carbon in construction materials.

We also hear from Pennsylvania hemp farmer Steve Groff, who shares a remarkable story about seeing an albino deer on his drive to Geneva.

Groff’s white deer might be a good omen for the industry, but it’s definitely a good omen for this episode of the podcast.

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Music by Tin Bird Shadow