Industrial Hemp on the National Mall

Apologies to Jimmy Stewart. I only went to Washington for one day. I took the train from Philadelphia May 6 to record a podcast episode at the Ag on the Mall event on the National Mall in D.C. The National Hemp Association and the Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council invited me to spend time at their display. They had a tent set up with tables full of products made from hemp: cat litter, animal bedding, shirts, rope, bio-plastics socks, flooring and biofuels. They even had a regular old 5-gallon bucket made from hemp. Next to the tent was The FiberCut, a four-tiered, adjustable-height sickle-bar mower made by Hemp Harvest Works in Nebraska. I spent the day talking to the hemp folks at the booth and people passing by, including Erica Stark, executive director of the National Hemp Association. "We are showcasing everything hemp. We have the hemp house on wheels here. We have the BMW i3. And most exciting is we have the new Livewire by Harley-Davidson that has hemp fenders on it that were actually grown in the United States," she said. This week's episode is a collection of short interviews with a handful of people. Pablo Falla, a business owner with businesses in the U.S. and South and Central America, told me about the differences between growing hemp in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. "Down in South America it's totally different," he said. "We got a perfect 12/12 all year long. So we can do up to four harvests a year. Andrew Bish, president of the Hemp Feed Coalition, had just returned from a meeting with the undersecretary of rural development at the USDA. "A lot of the dialogue was how we can create opportunities for fiber and grain producers to be able to access some of these government programs, some of these funds that they're not able to access right now because of the risk," Bish said. National Hemp Associationhttps://nationalhempassociation.org/ Pennsylvania Hemp Industry Council https://www.pahic.org/ Hemp Feed Coalition https://hempfeedcoalition.org/ Special thanks to Sandra Mason and the team at AEM Thanks to our Sponsors! IND HEMPhttps://indhemp.com/ Forever Green https://www.forevergreen.com/ Americhanvrehttps://americhanvre.com/ SunRay Hemp