Test often as you approach the harvest window. That’s the key advice from Rock River Laboratory Director Dustin Sawyer. Growing hemp can be a regulatory maze amidst the changes happening in the industry. Rock River Lab has a first-hand look at how Wisconsin hemp acres have shifted since it became legal to grow in the 2018 Farm Bill.
Rock River Lab formed a sister company called Pride Analytics and Consulting when hemp became a commodity product across the U.S.
“Through Pride Analytics and consulting in 2019, we were able to be, I believe, the largest hemp testing lab in the state,” Sawyer says. “We we analyzed well over 6,000 hemp samples in 2019.”
But since then, hemp acres have been very rapidly declining across the Midwest, including Wisconsin, to the point where in 2022, Pride Analytics analyzed just over 200 samples.
“Part of this has been the flooding of the hemp market in 2019. A lot of growers got into it, a lot of first time growers got into the hemp market and we all saw the hemp market just collapsed,” Sawyer explains. “Another part of this is the USDA regulations have really tightened on the growers and on the labs. And so I think several growers have gotten out of it just because they weren’t able to comply with the USDA compliance regulations.”
There are two types of hemp: hemp for fiber, grain and seed, which has no cannabinoid production; and hemp for cannabinoid production, such as CBD.
CBD was the original cannabinoid of interest in hemp back in 2019 into 2020, Sawyer explains. The value of the plant is based off of the concentration of CBD that’s in that plant, so the grower wants to push that plant as far along into the growing season as possible because the CBD will continue to accumulate.
“The trouble is that as that CBD continues to accumulate, so does the THC,” he says. “And so as the producer is pushing to get more and more value out of that crop, they’re also inching closer and closer to this cliff where their crop becomes illegal and they have to destroy it.”
Sawyer says he’s seen growers go from a legal crop to an illegal crop within a week — too high of a THC level. Meanwhile CBD also went up — 7 percent to 10 percent — increasing the value of the crop. Despite that value, the crop had to be destroyed.
“So we cannot emphasize enough as that crop begins to mature and you’re getting closer and closer to that harvest window, the more you can sample … not the official USDA sampling,” he says. “This is just sending samples to a lab to see where you’re at in the harvest window is absolutely critical because you want to hit that harvest window when the crop is most valuable. But it’s also legal.”
Sawyer encourages hemp growers to visit the new Midwestern Hemp Database as a resource for new varieties, regulations and more: https://extension.illinois.edu/hemp/midwestern-hemp-databases
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