Missouri used to be a top producer of hemp in the United States. But decades of being effectively banned has caused the hemp industry to disintegrate. Since the 2018 Farm Bill relegalized the crop, farmers are trying to pick up the pieces.
Hemp is not the same as marijuana. They’re both the same species of plant, called cannabis, but hemp has far lower levels of the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana that gets you high: delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol – or THC. That didn’t stop it from being caught in the crossfire of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively banned both versions of the crop.
Different variations of hemp are grown for different purposes. Floral hemp is often processed for CBD, or cannabidiol, and other variants can be processed into fiber and used for animal bedding, textiles and more.
According to the USDA, the amount of hemp planted in the U.S. saw a boom shortly after the 2018 Farm Bill, but it has dropped every year since 2021. In Missouri, the amount of hemp planted increased from 1400 acres in 2021 to 1900 acres in 2022. It dropped to 1750 acres last year.
“The issue is there is no market,” said Eleazar Gonzalez. an agricultural economist at Lincoln University. “When farmers started figuring out they cannot sell their products, or they were losing money, the market dropped.”
Gonzalez is part of Lincoln University’s Hemp Institute. The institute researches hemp and works with farmers to develop best practices and navigate the hemp supply chain. Gonzalez said that as time has gone on, farmers who ran into too many issues stopped growing hemp, but successful ones learned more and scaled up.
“It's like the Darwin law – surviving, only the guys who understand the market,” Gonzalez said.
He said that’s why while the amount of acres planted went down last year, the amount of hemp harvested actually increased.
“If you are planting less but harvesting more, you are more efficient,” he said. “That means the market is getting more stable.”
Sean Hackmann owns Grandpas Family Farms, based in the Osage County town of Chamois. There, he and shop manager Scott Mertz grow hemp, and they have personally seen the effect of working in an industry that has been frozen in time for decades.
“It's kind of like a learning curve,” Hackmann said. “You learn how to do it the first year, you're experimenting, trying to figure out how to do it. Your production's not very good. You learn when to sow it, how to water it, how to take care of it, how to get it out of the ground. It’s 90% of that hurdle."
“We're kind of writing our own standard operating procedures on how to make this happen,” Mertz said.
While most of the business is dedicated to floral hemp, which Grandpas Family Farms turns into a line of CBD and smokeable products, Hackmann said he is looking to expand more into the hemp fiber industry going forward because the CBD industry is oversaturated.
“I foresee the fiber and seed industry growing faster than the CBD industry,” he said. “On the fiber side, there's not really much competition for it, it's a specialty niche of a product that people can use.”
Missouri Governor Mike Parson signed an executive order on Aug. 1 banning the sale of foods that contain psychoactive compounds found in some hemp. That includes some of the products that Grandpas Family Farms sells, like gummies with delta-8 THC, an unregulated cannabinoid that produces similar effects to delta-9 THC.
CBD products are not affected by the executive order, as they are not psychoactive.
Gonzalez predicts the industrial hemp industry will continue to get stronger as more infrastructure is developed and demand increases.
“Once we get that stabilization from local markets, the industry is going to grow,” he said.
