Hemp has failed Texas farmers during first drought

Subscribe to The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to date on the most essential Texas news.

When the Texas Legislature legalized hemp in 2019, state Sen. Charles Perry called hemp “the hot crop,” a drought-resistant lifeline for farmers.

It won the Senate and the House by unanimous votes. He had the support of the Commissioner of Agriculture Sid Miller.

“Allowing the Texas Department of Agriculture to create an industrial hemp program here in Texas will give Texas farmers an exciting new opportunity to thrive, and that’s something everyone should get behind,” Miller told The Texas tribune “It’s about Texas farmers and ranchers and seeing them thrive.”

But since its legalization, farmers have lost interest in hemp, especially hemp grown for fiber and grain to make clothing, textiles and paper. Those who invested have yet to see returns and say hemp, like other crops, is struggling statewide during one of the driest years on record. Texas farmers must cut their losses by abandoning failed crops to save valuable resources. And with so much at stake, some farmers aren’t willing to risk investing in hemp.

“The interest of the farmers is not there,” said Kyle Bingham, president of the Texas Hemp Growers Association. “They don’t want to waste time, money, land or anything with hemp right now.”

And while hemp production struggles to take off, farmers are still struggling to make a profit, affecting rural communities that rely heavily on the agricultural industry.

without water

This year’s drought was the first serious weather test for Texas’ budding hemp industry. And by all measures, the hemp planted in Texas soil has not been able to withstand the extreme conditions.

“To say this is a drought-tolerant crop is not accurate,” said Bingham, who grows industrial hemp along with grapes at his Meadow Farm southwest of Lubbock. “We can grow dryland cotton in a year like this when you never have success growing dryland hemp.”

The state is experiencing its driest year since 2011, with more than 76 percent of Texas facing drought conditions, according to the US Drought Monitor. It has had a devastating impact on Texas farmers who are reporting the worst crop losses in the country: yields are down 68%, according to a summer survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation.

A center pivot irrigates the hemp crop at Bingham Family Vineyards in Meadow, about 30 miles southwest of Lubbock, on Aug. 26, 2022.

Credit:

Justin Rex for The Texas Tribune

Drought can slow crop growth because less water and soil moisture is available, and hemp is no different.

Farmers saw industrial hemp fail because the soil hardened in the dry heat. Hemp can also be grown for cannabis or CBD, in which case it is grown in greenhouses and requires even greater amounts of water than industrial hemp.

“In this first growing season of 2020, many of our farmers, especially those who grow outdoors, are the ones who noticed how much water they really needed for these plants to really thrive,” said Ilissa Nolan, CEO of Texas Hemp. coalition “Especially when this is the type of plant that grows the most in the summer months, where it’s ridiculously hot in our state.”

In Dripping Springs, Hays County, Aaron Owens sees his farm receive an average of 36 inches of rain each year. Rainfall has been sparse this year, with only 4.5 inches of rain in late August.

Farmers plow the land to prepare it for sowing. But plowing in a dry field where the soil is hard as rock is difficult. Owens waited to plant the crop until later in the season, and when he did, he learned the crop needed a lot more water than in previous years.

“A lot of the guys I know couldn’t even believe we plowed it because they thought it would be too hard to crack,” said Owens, who unlike most grows hemp outdoors for CBD . “But we did it and it worked.”

For hemp grown for CBD and fiber, the optimum daytime temperature for production is 70 degrees to 80 degrees, said Calvin Trostle, AgriLife’s statewide hemp specialist. But temperatures across the state this summer broke record highs and were often in the triple digits, exacerbating conditions that led to poor harvests.

Asked about claims that hemp was drought-resistant, Nolan, with the Texas Hemp Coalition, laughed. The characterization of hemp as drought tolerant was based on trials in Kentucky and Colorado, he said, states with very different climates.

Texas is a different ball game.

Farmers saw hemp as ‘a lifeline’

The US Congress passed the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, legalizing hemp at the federal level as long as it contained no more than 0.3% of tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive element in marijuana known as THC.

The following year, the Texas legislature followed suit, creating a pathway for the production of hemp and hemp-derived extracts such as CBD oil with less than 0.3% THC. The bill gave the state primary regulatory authority over hemp production.

A portion of the hemp crop at Bingham Family Vineyards in the Meadow. “To say this is a drought tolerant crop is not accurate,” said farmer Kyle Bingham.

Credit:

Justin Rex for The Texas Tribune

But it wasn’t just about regulation: Advocates envisioned a booming hemp industry in Texas. At a hearing, the House Agriculture and Livestock Committee heard testimony about out-of-state success: In Kentucky, a hemp pilot program paid $3,000 to $5,000 per acre of hemp.

“I personally think Texas will become a leader in this area because it’s already a big agricultural producing state to begin with. Farmers have been looking at this bill as a lifeline to save their family farms,” ​​he said Lisa Pittman, attorney specializing in cannabis law.

The agricultural sector had faced an economic crisis. Even cotton, a crop long considered a strength of Texas agriculture, was struggling. The legalization of hemp was welcomed as a possible solution to the crisis and even an alternative to cotton.

Declining interest in cultivation

Hemp licenses are down, according to industry experts. The state agency responsible for tracking that data did not respond by publication to multiple requests from The Texas Tribune.

The challenges of extreme weather conditions were among the reality checks that have hit the few farmers who have planted the crop.

The legalization of hemp was accompanied by an influx of hemp growers eager to profit from the new crop. But demand couldn’t keep up with the gold rush mentality, and Texans were struggling to find buyers after the crop was harvested.

“It led to an oversupply crisis, drove up the price of hemp meal and CBD, and that left many farmers in 2018, 2019 and 2020 with inventories they couldn’t sell,” he say Jody McGinness, executive director of the Hemp Industries Association.

And there is still no clear market for hemp in Texas. Farmers find few or no established processing facilities or consistent buyers seeking Texas-grown fiber or grain. Many retailers still source their fiber and grain internationally to get the products at a better price, said Leah Lakstins, who works with retailers and hemp farmers to develop Texas hemp businesses.

And as the hemp industry sees setbacks in its early stages, fewer farmers are willing to invest their limited resources in the crop. The 2019 state bill legalizing hemp in Texas was supposed to be a victory for farmers, but farmers are now just one part of the industry. According to a USDA survey, the majority of people in the hemp industry are not farming as their primary source of income and are growing hemp for CBD.

“Farmers have been doing this for a long time and they just recognize that this is too volatile a market for it to make sense to continue working,” said Bingham, the industrial hemp farmer at Meadow.

Despite all this, hemp industry leaders remain optimistic that the crop can take off as long as farmers regain interest in industrial hemp and introduce it into their row crop rotations. Farmers can work with hemp genetics to better tolerate drought conditions, for example.

But with reduced licenses, the industry needs to build appetite for the crop in a fragile industry where taking risks with hemp has already hurt many farmers.

The sun sets behind the hemp crop at Bingham Family Vineyards in the Meadow.

Credit:

Justin Rex for The Texas Tribune

“We have to find a way for farmers to have confidence and have absolute certainty that they will be able to get a profit that they can rely on,” McGinness said.

Bingham said time is running out for the hemp industry. Hemp production has “promise and potential” in Texas, he said, but the industry has about two years to build a market for hemp before farmers pull out entirely.

“If we don’t get it right, we’re going to blow this opportunity,” Bingham said. “And if we ever try to go back and rebuild this, it’s going to be a lot harder to build the industry.”

Jayme Lozano contributed to this story.

The full lineup is now LIVE for the 2022 Texas Tribune Festival, September 22-24 in Austin. Explore the schedule of more than 100 mind-expanding conversations at TribFest, including the inside track on the 2022 election and 2023 legislative session, the state of the public and higher education in this stage of the pandemic, for what Texas suburbs are booming, why broadband access matters, the legacy of slavery, what really happened in Uvalde and more. Check out the program.