
Farmers rushed into hemp, but now face a glut - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/farmers-rushed-into-hemp-now-they-face-a-glut-11575118801?mod=rsswn
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cannaceo
It really depends how you approached it. CBD flower from the colas is still
selling well even if biomass isn't. CBG biomass is still selling at
$200-275/lb. An acre costs about $10k to plant and yields 2,000lb of biomass.
Most people lost their shirts because

1) they weren't growing on contract and didn't have buyers lined up 2) didn't
grow for smokable flower 3) had their plants herm due to bad seed stock or
environmental stress 4) their hemp ran 'hot' with THC over the allowable
levels and they live in a state where the AG commissioner cares. Was up in
Oregon and the farmers were telling me as long as it's under 2.0% THC they get
a pass. In more strict states it's 0.3%.

Source: am a shareholder in a large CBD cultivation/manufacturing business.

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arkades
> In more strict states it's 0.3%.

Just to clarify: <=0.3% is the federal cut-off. it’s protected by the
agricultural whatever act of 2018 - the plant itself is legal to cultivate,
and its CBD oil derivatives are likewise loosely regulated. Above that it’s
considered to be illegal cannabis, and -its- CBD oil derivatives are regulated
accordingly.

~~~
Wheaties466
just to clarify: 2018 United States farm bill

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_farm_bill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_farm_bill)

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goda90
CBD being the main drive to get into hemp seems misguided. People have been
pushing the advantages of hemp fibers in industrial use cases for a long time,
but obviously it will take awhile for these products to build up steam since
hemp was less common in the past.

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kilo_bravo_3
You’ve been able to have shipping containers of the stuff delivered from China
and other places to your loading dock for decades.

They grow millions upon millions of tons of it each year and have an entire
infrastructure of university and government research organizations built up
around hemp cultivation.

The industrial products are never coming. Access by US domestic engineers and
scientists to hemp on the order of days instead of weeks won’t change that.

There are billions of people on earth for which hemp cultivation has never
been illegal, where they have grown it for centuries if not millennia.

To think that domestic production will spin up the release of industrial
products can only lead to one of two conclusions:

1\. There are no industrial uses of hemp to the degree that advocates claim.
(The ludicrous ones) or,

2\. Most of rest of the world, around 3 billion people, are all stupid and/or
incompetent and only the smart and industrious US domestic engineers and
scientists can figure out how to use hemp for things other than hippy bags.

I’ve been around the world. I’m going to go with 1.

I’m not saying hemp doesn’t have industrial uses.

I’m saying that the claims by some of its more fervent activists, on the order
of “hemp fuel will power hemp steel-manufactured flying cars adorned in hemp
faux “Rich Corinthian“ leather, that land of runways made of hempcrete and
it’s all going to be carbon neural and organic because hemp violates the laws
of thermodynamics and doesn’t require fertilizer or pesticide” are wrong.

~~~
throwaway1777
You left out the option that the industrial hemp products are more expensive
(at this point) so only niche producers use it. I think hemp will see some
industrial usage when it becomes cost effective.

~~~
neaden
How much is industrial hemp used in countries where it has always been legal
though?

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hutzlibu
But what countries are that?

As far as I know, most followed US hegemony, and for example in germany it was
legal, but very hard to get permission to grow hemp. So only small uses like
for making rope and birdfood.

So I also believe demand and supply for various things will grow. I really
like for example, that nowdays you can get organic hemp seeds in the
supermarket. It gets more in fashion, because it is nice and quite healthy.
But no, hemp will probably not disrupt big industries. It might disrupt the
alcohol industrie a bit though, when it is widespread legal.

~~~
neaden
The Soviet Union grew it quite extensively, and I believe both Canada, France,
and Australia have allowed its growing for a couple decades now. It doesn't
seem like in any of those countries it has lived up to the potential pro-hemp
boosters claim.

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neonate
[http://archive.is/hmlLz](http://archive.is/hmlLz)

~~~
jason0597
I wish paywall/registration bypasses could be the original link by the OP, or
at the very least, pinned at the top of the comments.

~~~
zhobbs
I don't understand why HN finds piracy acceptable for news content. If the
post was about a video game or movie release, should we pin a link to the
.torrent file?

~~~
jason0597
The difference being that you don't need to play the entire game or watch the
entire movie in order to take part in the discussion about that game's/movie's
release. However, you do need to read the entire article before being able to
take part in the discussion about that article. So I think it's fair that OPs
should either make sure that the articles the post are accessible to all (and
hence the discussion about those articles (which is the entire point of hacker
news) is also accessible), or just don't post paywalled articles ...or
alternatively post a paywall bypass. Maybe it's not right, but it's a
solution.

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cvs268
Oh! Is this what the entire "Tegridy Farms" spin-off season of South Park all
about?...

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soylentcola
I think that was more about the rush to jump on the legal cannabis (high-THC
for medical/recreational as well as low-THC for CBD and fiber, oil, etc.)

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aussiegreenie
Goldmine market mentality (aka investment fad of the year) gets popular and
the market is oversupplied, the market corrects.

Business 101

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scythe
Hemp seeds have failed to catch on as food for a simple reason: they're too
strongly flavored. The nutrition claims are largely true, and the flavor isn't
terrible, but in order for hempseed to provide, say, 15 grams of protein to a
meal, you need to eat about a quarter of a cup of hempseeds. Imagine eating a
quarter of a cup of sesame seeds. See the problem? I think the missing link
here is some kind of fermentation process that produces something more
palatable.

As for the fiber, it's a relatively unremarkable cellulosic fiber. It is
rather coarse and contains about 8% lignin, which means hemp fabric is
relatively stiff and rough, limiting its application to clothing beyond its
branding power (and shoes, where it works well). However, it is useful in
composites. Hemp is apparently being used to make composite panels for several
cars in the present day, although the actual volume in this market is not so
high. The asterisk is that there are lots of other similar fibers (jute,
linen, lyocell) that work well in composites, and it's the resins (polyester)
which tend to be both more expensive and environmentally problematic. If some
kind of more eco-friendly resin technology appears (don't hold your breath) it
could become more widespread.

Other claims, e.g. hemp as a building material, are just wrong (hempcrete is
not structural). Hemp rope was replaced by manila which has better moisture
resistance. Hemp as a biodiesel precursor is unremarkable.

~~~
maxwellg
Trader Joe's has a vanilla hemp protein powder I like (milk-based ones mess
with my stomach). I couldn't imagine eating the seeds directly, but they go
down very easy in a smoothie.

I'm not familiar with any fermentation process that operates on nuts, or any
high-fat food source besides soybeans.

~~~
scythe
There is apparently a semi-standardized process where a hydrated nut butter is
fermented with yogurt bacteria for a few days:

[http://www.bccdc.ca/resource-
gallery/Documents/Educational%2...](http://www.bccdc.ca/resource-
gallery/Documents/Educational%20Materials/EH/FPS/Food/Fermented_Nut_Cheese.pdf)

I'm not sure if this process has been attempted with hempseeds. It's a fast
bacterial process, in contrast with the slow fungal fermentation of dairy
cheeses. I wouldn't really say it's a commercial-ready process at this point;
I'd like to see something done with proper cheese cultures!

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newman8r
The WSJ article makes me feel better about strongly urging a family member
against an investment in a hemp farm in 2018. They used an unrealistic value
for the price of CBD in their projections and didn't account for a decrease in
the price over the next few years.

But besides that, it was one of the worst business plans I'd ever seen. I
couldn't tell if they were just inept, or were scam artists looking for
gullible investors.

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at-fates-hands
This reminds me of the ethanol rush in the early aughts by farmers who rushed
to pull the crops they were growing to switch over to corn in hopes ethanol
and E85 craze would take off.

A decade later and the debate still rages whether ethanol and E85 was even it
worth it now with electric vehicles and hybrids are way more common and many
stations who had E85 pumps are all but gone now.

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coderintherye
As another comment noted, biomass is overproduced and prices low but premium
smokeable hemp flower is still doing well. I imagine more farmers will shift
in that direction next year, assuming the new USDA rules don't destroy the
industry.

The new USDA guidelines would make almost all of the current strains of CBD-
dominant flower unavailable to grow due to the change in testing to count
total THC rather than just delta-9 THC. Some farmers will switch to CBG which
is another cannabinoid, but it's not one that is going to have as wide of an
appeal.

My small friends and family grows in Southern Oregon and we did ok this year
despite the challenges, but there is a lot of uncertainty around what will
happen next year due to the potential regulation changes.

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FernandoTN
You know you are in a huge production bubble when all major cannabis producers
use as their main metric their production capacity. Aurora cannabis even went
as far as to lower their Average net selling price of wholesale bulk cannabis
by 4% in the last quarter, due to not finding the demand to keep up with the
production boom of the industry.

Reminds me of the scene in the "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and
Power" where oil was booming and production was hardly centralized which led
to big fluctuations in the price and an overestimation of the demand, and
therefore of the necessary supply.

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themango
Shame, he didnt grow his crop with tegridy

~~~
rideontime
What does this mean?

~~~
dlivingston
It's a South Park reference.

~~~
Sabinus
Aren't comments like that against the guidelines?

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fmajid
That's unfortunate, because industrial hemp (as opposed to cannabis hemp)is
the most efficient way to capture carbon dioxide in the form of biomass. It
should be grown for carbon credits alone, but this (cannabis) hemp bubble
imploding will taint industrial hemp by association.

~~~
brianwawok
How does this work?

You grow a ton of hemp. It captures X tons of carbon.

People use it for rope or whatever. Eventually throw it away. It decays or is
burned. X tons of carb are released back into the atmosphere.

How did that capture any carbon?

~~~
ajross
Sequestration remains an open problem. There are no large scale biomass
capture projects in operation. But the science isn't hard: you bury it,
basically. Or if you want to be fancy you burn it for biomass energy and
capture the resulting CO2 for fancier sequestration techniques. Both are
expensive, and no one is willing to foot the bill.

Right now the only realistic way to use photosynthesis to capture CO2 in a
long term way is to plant a forest. There's some amount of this going on,
though not enough to even cover deforestation elsewhere.

~~~
Taniwha
We need to start throwing our old newspapers down coal mines (or bury it)
rather than recycling it - that will encourage more trees to be grown and
solid paper is a great way to sequester carbon

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colechristensen
Has there been much usage for the fiber? (Paper, rope, textiles, etc.)

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ChuckMcM
Guess we're going to have to start exporting it :-)

