2020 Ag Journal Winter by Daily Record

Ag Journal Daily Record Winter 2020

Local family changes to farming lifestyle Farming subsidies seem to be favoring the south Impossible Meat unveils new pork, sausage products 401 N. Main Street Ellensburg, WA 98926

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Table of contents

Ag Journal Editor Michael Gallagher

Publisher Heather Hernandez Advertising Contact us: Ag Journal 401 N. Main Street Ellensburg, WA 98926 509-925-1414 The Ag Journal is published three times a year by Kittitas County Publishing LLC. Contents copyrighted 2020 unless otherwise noted.

Local family changes to farming lifestyle Page 4

Impossible Meat unveils new products Page 8

Farming subsidies are favoring the South, other regions irked

Proposed U.S. hemp rules worry industry

Page 10

Page 14

On the cover: Jacob Ford / Daily Record

Free range chickens stand together Wednesday at Colockum Hillside Farm.

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Lifestyle change

Jacob Ford / Daily Record

Free-range chickens stand together at Colockum Hillside Farm. 4 | 2020 Ag Journal - Winter

Suzanne Johnson and her family switched things up and got into the farming business

By LUKE OLSON staff writer

uzanne Johnson didn’t necessarily have the repertoire or experience, but with a desire for some life changes along with some passion, her career went into a different direction. “I was self-taught,” Johnson said. “I was not raised a farmer.” Johnson was amid her teaching profession at Central Washington University. She taught English as a second language for nine years, but when her husband Tim Dittmer endured health problems, the family made lifestyle adjustments — which included eating better. Soon enough, it was less teaching and more gardening. And it snowballed from there.

What now exists in the shrubsteppe of Ellensburg four years later is Colockum Hillside Farm. It’s an off-grid farm that raises chickens, turkeys, pigs, veggies and plant starts. And while the shrub-steppe isn’t an ideal location for any farm, Johnson makes it work. The farm –– and their home –– is also run off solar panels 3,000 feet up. “We are completely off-grid,” Johnson said. “I think we’re probably the only off-grid small farm in the Ellensburg area. There are no power lines that come up here. We were off-grid before we knew we wanted the farm.” What started with a small garden along with 12 chickens for the family quickly evolved.

See Farm, Page 6

Jacob Ford / Daily Record

A turkey stands tall next to the free-range chickens Wednesday at Colockum Hillside Farm.

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Farm Continued from Page 5 People became interested in Johnson’s eggs, and today, the farm raises 215 layer hens and 200 meat chickens. Chicken egg sales burgeoned and Johnson no longer treks to customer’s houses to deliver them. Eggs can now be picked up at Jerrol’s on University Way. Rolf Williams, the owner, supports local farms and allows Johnson to use his lobby as a location for customer pickups. “It was all direct to begin with. So, it was all basically friends of mine who bought them and when I first started out, I would drive around to people’s houses and drop off eggs for them,” Johnson said. “But now we’re up to 50 dozen eggs a week to direct customers, so I can’t go to everyone’s house anymore.” Colockum Hillside Farm chickens freely roam the shrub-steppe compared to the confined commer-

cially raised chickens where access is very limited. Johnson’s chickens are getting a lot of greens out on the farm, and she’s meticulous in what kind of feed they eat. “It’s just a better, quality product,” Johnson said. “They taste better and it is supporting a kind of farming that is more humane to animals, too.” Johnson recently added Berkshire pigs last spring and didn’t push to sell them at first, but did put the word out that there were three of them. The family was hoping to keep one full pig for themselves, but at the end of the afternoon, they sold 2 1/2. “So, I immediately got more pigs,” Johnson chuckled. Today, 12 Berkshires reside on the farm. And like the chickens, they aren’t in a fixed location. The Berkshires are rotated every two weeks and are fed a non-GMO feed that doesn’t have corn or soy. The Berkshires stay on the farm for six months before heading to the

market. “It’s better for our land,” Johnson said of moving pigs to different locations every two weeks. “Because pigs make a big mess of things. And it’s better for them because instead of sitting in their own excrement, they just keep moving along.” During the Holiday Farmers Market in Ellensburg on Dec. 14, Johnson’s pork — that was USDA cut in different types of pieces — nearly sold out. Johnson kept 1/3 of the two pigs left and that was stored and became available for customers to preregister and pick up once a month at Jerrol’s. This will continue up until the Farmers Market this May. “I’m hoping that with those nine pigs down there that we’ll have plenty to sell through the summer at the farmers market and people will walk up and buy it on the spot,” Johnson said. Johnson also sells meat chickens and turkeys, too, but those are sold fresh from the farm seasonally.

CHALLENGES FACED

There are plenty of challenges, but Johnson doesn’t grouse. Living in the shrub-steppe is one of them. That type of land lacks quality soil, and it forces Johnson to bring in soil from the valley floor for her garden which is grown in hoop houses. That leads to another predicament. Nearly every year one of her hoop houses is blown away because of the intense winds up on the hill. “This isn’t really farmland,” she said. “So, we’re trying to do something in an area that wasn’t designed for what we’re trying to do. And we’re trying to do it responsibly without damaging the land too much.” Johnson and Dittmer — who helps with the mechanical and technical side of the farm, and also finances — are still figuring out the farm’s niche. And 10 years down the road, Johnson sees the farm in a different location.

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“That’s something we’re working on as we’re developing a sense of what we’re good at and what we’re not good at,” she said. “But I think the whole idea is that we’re trying to make it sustainable. We’re trying to make each part support the other. “For example, our chicken bedding and chicken manure go into our compost pile which goes in our veggies. … We’re trying to make it as closed of a system as possible that we have each part of the farm here for a reason and supporting some other part of the farm.” You’ll be able to find Colockum Hillside Farm at the farmers market this May through the summer. Johnson has two employees in Sean Brannan and Willow Fultz, both with different responsibilities. “Sean is the caretaker of the farm,” Johnson said. “He maintains our vehicles, takes care of our grounds, builds, maintains and repairs farm structures. “Willow is my assistant. She helps with animal care, harvesting, marketing, and her biggest task during the main season is to be our farmers market representative.” Colockum Hillside Farm can be found on both Facebook (search Colockum Hillside Farm) and Instagram (@colockumhillsidefarm). Their website: www.colockumhillsidefarm.com. Johnson can also be reached through email: suzanne@colockumhillsidefarm.com.

Jacob Ford / Daily Record

Piglets stands in their pig house at Colockum Hillside Farm.

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The other fake meat

AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

A variety of Impossible Pork dishes from Impossible Foods, the California plant-based meat company, as the company unveils Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage before the CES tech show in Las Vegas. 8 | 2020 Ag Journal - Winter

Impossible Foods company unveils pork, sausage

By DEE-ANN DURBIN AP Business Writer

fter a big year for its plant-based burger, Impossible Foods has something new on its plate. The California-based company unveiled Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage on Monday evening at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas. It’s Impossible Food’s first foray beyond fake beef. The Impossible Burger, which went on sale in 2016, has been a key player in the growing category of vegan meats. Like the burger, Impossible Food’s pork and sausage are made from soy but mimic the taste and texture of ground meat. Impossible Pork will be rolled out to restaurants first. The company isn’t yet saying when it will come to groceries. Impossible Foods only recently began selling its burgers in grocery stores, although they’re available at more than 17,000 restaurants in the U.S., Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau. Burger King will give consumers their first taste of Impossible Sausage. Later this month, 139 Burger King restaurants in five U.S. cities will offer the Impossible Croissan’wich, made with plant-based sausage coupled with the traditional egg and cheese. Burger King did a similar test of the Impossible Whopper last year before expanding sales nationwide. The pork products and the Impossible Burger are made in a similar way. Impossible Foods gets heme — the protein that gives meat its flavor and texture — from soy leghemoglobin, which is found in the roots of soy plants. To make heme in high volume, it inserts the DNA from soy into yeast and ferments it. That mixture is then combined with other ingredients, like coconut oil. The company tweaked the ingredients to mimic pork’s springy texture and mild flavor. For the sausage it added spices. Impossible Pork has 220 calories in a fourounce serving. That’s not much less than a serving of Smithfield 80% lean ground pork, which has 260 calories. Smithfield’s animalderived pork has more total fat, at 20 grams, than Impossible Pork, which has 13 grams. But Impossible Pork has far more sodium, at 420 milligrams. Smithfield has 70 milligrams. But health concerns are only part of the reason consumers are eating more plant-based meats. Animal welfare and environmental concerns are also a factor. Nearly 1.5 billion pigs are killed for food each year, a number that has tripled in the last 50 years, according

AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin

A patron samples a new Impossible Pork dish from Impossible Foods, the California plant-based meat company, as the company unveils the Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage before the CES tech show. to the World Economic Forum. Raising those pigs depletes natural resources and increases greenhouse gas emissions. “Everything that we’re doing is trying to avert the biggest threat that the world is facing,” Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown told The Associated Press. Brown said the company decided pork should be its next product because customers were frequently requesting it. Impossible Foods started working on the new products about 18 months ago and accelerated development in the second half of 2019.

EXPANSION GOALS

Brown said ground pork is also critical to meeting the company’s international expansion goals. While Americans eat more beef and chicken, pork is the most widely consumed meat worldwide, according to the National Pork Board. Chinese consumers eat more than 88 pounds of pork per year, compared to 65 pounds (30 kilograms) for Americans. Brown said he believes a product like Impossible Pork is critical in China, which has limited arable land and relies heavily on imported meat. Last year, Chinese pork prices surged after African swine fever wiped out millions of pigs. Brown said Impossible Foods is talking to Chinese regulators and potential partners that could make Impossible Pork — as well as plantbased burgers — in China. 9 | 2020 Ag Journal - Winter

“This is a huge opportunity for China in terms of its food security,” Brown said. Impossible Foods is also waiting for approval from European regulators to sell its products there. In the U.S., 2019 was a breakout year for plantbased meat. U.S. sales jumped 10% last year to nearly $1 billion; traditional meat sales rose 2% to $95 billion in that same time, according to Nielsen. Impossible Foods rival Beyond Meat — which already sells plant-based sausage links — had a successful public stock offering in the spring. Impossible Foods ran short of burgers in the first half of the year thanks to the buzz from Burger King. After partnering with OSI Group, a food service company, Brown said Impossible Foods produced twice as much of its plant-based meat in the last quarter of 2019 as it sold in all of 2018. “We have to keep scaling up as fast as we possibly can,” Brown said. Brown said he welcomes new competitors in the space, including deep-pocketed rivals like Nestle and Tyson Foods. The meat industry is vast, he said, and plant-based meats are still only around 1% of sales. His only concern is that plant-based products taste good enough to convince meat eaters to switch. “A crappy product won’t win over meat lovers,” Brown said.

Balancing bailouts

Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune/TNS

In this file photo, soybeans are harvested on Oct. 10, 2019, in Manteno, Illinois. A 2019 federal payment program intended to help farmers facing low prices caused by President Donald Trumpâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trade war with China has paid the South higher rates than the Midwest. 10 | 2020 Ag Journal - Winter

enci Sickler, a fifthgeneration farmer who oversees more than 10,000 acres in western North Dakota, stops short of saying whether farmers in Southern states are better off than his peers in the Midwest. The payment rates vary by county, but a 2019 federal payment program intended to help farmers facing low prices caused by President Donald Trump’s trade war with China has paid the South higher rates than the Midwest. The payments are intended to support farmers for crops like soybeans and corn that were subject to retaliatory tariffs from China. In North Dakota, which typically sends more than two-thirds of its soybeans to China, it’s more expensive to send exports to new markets such as Europe. Lawmakers, academics and farmers question whether the aid has favored certain regions and states, and whether the payments line up with farmers’ actual economic losses. Local farmers in western North Dakota, whose counties are generally receiving a lower rate than eastern counties, are disappointed about the rates, though they won’t complain, Sickler said. “But it’s still a little disheartening to know that we were at the bottom of the list just based on locations.” Farmers in the Midwest face tough decisions heading into the new year after being walloped by historic rain and flooding on top of trade uncertainties and several years of low commodity

prices. Even with the apparent end to Trump’s trade war with China, they’ll continue to endure 2019’s unprecedented economic and weather challenges. Economists predict fewer crops in the Dakotas, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. It’s likely the U.S. Department of Agriculture will distribute a third tranche of the traderelated payments, called Market Facilitation Program payments, to farmers who grow soybeans, corn and other crops affected by the tariffs. It’s not yet known who would be eligible, how payments would be distributed or when. This year’s payments of up to $14.5 billion have been critical to shoring up the farm economy. They also picked “winners and losers between regions and crops,” according to a November report from Democratic members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, fueling a partisan fight on Capitol Hill. The report provides evidence that the 2019 MFP awarded 95% of top payment rates to Southern farmers; helped wealthy farms and foreign companies; and offered no long-term investment or plan for rebuilding lost markets. The minority members represent the Corn Belt, West and Northeast. But states in the Midwest, which have more farmers and farm acreage, have received the highest payouts across two years of the program. Rough estimates show Illinois ($2.6 billion) and Iowa ($2.5 billion) at the top, followed by Minnesota ($1.7 billion) and Kansas ($1.6 billion).

See Subsidies, Page 12

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Farm subsidies favor South, irking other regions

Subsidies Continued from Page 11 South. By contrast, the payment per pound of corn went from 1 cent to 14 cents. Counties in the West, upper Midwest and Eastern Seaboard tended to be paid at rates below $50 an acre. The average payment rate in North Dakota, where agriculture represents about a quarter of the state’s economy, was $31 an acre. Many counties in the southwestern part of the state were paid at the minimum rate. Southeastern North Dakota, where five counties rank among the top 20 soybean bushel producers in the country, was paid at rates up to $60 an acre. As in other states, payment rates in neighboring counties differed wildly. “It’s not equitable necessarily from farm to farm,” said Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union, “and then it’s not enough to offset what may have been substantially higher prices had we not had a trade war.”

‘WE’D RATHER HAVE BETTER TRADE’

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crops because of trade disputes and retaliatory tariffs, and not to provide relief from natural disasters, flooding and other extreme weather. The first year of payments, in 2018, was restricted to producers of a limited number of crops — soybeans, corn, cotton, sorghum, wheat, sweet cherries, shelled almonds — and hog and dairy producers. Crop payments were based on harvested production in 2018 and the value of U.S. exports after Chinese tariffs. In 2019, the program took a different approach to avoid influencing planting decisions. As officials had the year before, they estimated damage from retaliatory tariffs, but the number of eligible crops increased from nine to 41. Among the new crops were chickpeas, dried beans and lentils. But announcing a second payment year in May had broader effects. “No official at USDA would have ever announced a payment like this in a planting season,” said Jonathan Coppess, a clinical assistant professor in agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-

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Between the Market Facilitation Program and two additional programs, the Trump administration has authorized roughly $28 billion in 2018 and 2019 to compensate farmers and ranchers for their losses caused by trade tariffs and to shore up political support from an important constituency, according to a November report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The differences between the 2018 and 2019 programs and a lack of transparency in how this year’s payments were calculated has opened the USDA to criticism. Unlike the 2018 payments, which were based on production, this year’s payment rates were distributed on a per acre basis and range from $15 to $150. Rates of more than $100 an acre are concentrated in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas and Arizona, according to the University of Illinois publication farmdoc daily. The difference is caused in part by the increasing MFP payment per pound of cotton, which went from 6 cents to 26 cents between 2018 and 2019. Cotton is largely produced in the

Champaign. “One of the results of that we’re seeing is late harvest. Just having a late planting season is not an isolated incident. It causes other challenges.” Per-acre payment rates were based on the “impact of unjustified trade retaliation in that county,” according to the USDA. The department calculated the aggregate effect on commodities in each county and divided that figure by the average total acres of eligible crops reported to the department between 2015 and 2018. While about three-fourths of 2018 payments went to soybean growers and were concentrated in Corn Belt states, that changed this year. Producers growing different eligible crops received the same payment rate because the rates were set by county rather than by crop. During an October hearing of the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee, USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen Censky insisted the 2019 MFP payments are equitable and based on models the department created to show the effects of retaliatory tariffs. “That has been done on a consistent basis without any kind of consideration of North, South, East, West or anything like that to take a look at what are the actual effects,” Censky said. According to the Senate Democrats, five Southern states — Georgia, Mississippi,

Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas — received the highest per-acre payment rates in the first round of 2019 MFP payments. “And while the impacts of the retaliatory tariffs are widespread, the payment rates have not aligned to help the regions and crops harmed the most,” according to the report by the Senate Agriculture Committee’s Democratic members. Meghan Cline, communications director for the committee’s Republican chairman, U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, did not respond to several requests for comment. Other critics point to a lack of transparency in how the USDA calculated MFP payment rates, the broad discretion it allows Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to spend taxpayer dollars without congressional approval and a failure to account for cross-commodity effects. For example, low soybean prices lead to low canola oil prices. Canola farmers are considered in the county payment rates, but the 2019 program doesn’t attach a price to canola. “The pressure on the MFP program, the political pressure, is growing and it signals a bigger problem in the farm economy,” said David Widmar, an agricultural economist at Agricultural Economic Insights, LLC. “Producers still, to this day, are not profitable enough to cover all their obligations.”

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Amid 2019’s economic and weather challenges, producers sought help from an array of federal programs. In addition to MFP, they had access to crop insurance, disaster assistance, regular crop programs and cover crop payments. It’s unclear to what extent the programs interacted and whether the USDA considered the potential for overlapping payments, said Carl Zulauf, professor emeritus in the department of agricultural, environmental and development economics at the Ohio State University in Columbus. “I think that’s a really important policy question that we as policy analysts and policymakers need to grapple with,” Zulauf said. “When you sum the programs together, were farmers overcompensated for losses due to natural disasters?” Meanwhile farm bankruptcies were up 24% in 2019 from 2018. Over the 12-month period ending in September, Chapter 12 filings were highest in Wisconsin (48), followed by Georgia, Nebraska and Kansas (37 each). Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wisconsin were among the states that experienced filings at or above 10-year highs, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.

See Subsidies, Page 15

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High anxiety

Proposed US hemp rules worry industry By GILLIAN FLACCUS Associated Press PORTLAND (AP) — Hemp growers and entrepreneurs who were joyous a year ago after U.S. lawmakers reclassified the plant as a legal agricultural crop now are worried their businesses could be crippled if federal policymakers move ahead with draft regulations. Licenses for hemp cultivation topped a half-million acres last year, more than 450% above 2018 levels, so there’s intense interest in the rules the U.S. government is creating. Critical comments on the draft have poured in from hemp farmers, processors, retailers and

state governments. Growers are concerned the government wants to use a heavy hand that could result in many crops failing required tests and being destroyed. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agency writing the rules, estimates 20% of hemp lots would fail under the proposed regulations. “Their business is to support farmers — and not punish farmers — and the rules as they’re written right now punish farmers,” said Dove Oldham, who last year grew an acre (0.40 hectares) of hemp on her family farm in Grants Pass. “There’s just a lot of confusion, and people are just looking for leadership.”

The USDA did not respond to the criticism but has taken the unusual step of extending the public comment period by a month, until Jan. 29. The agency told The Associated Press it will analyze information from this year’s growing season before releasing its final rules, which would take effect in 2021. Agricultural officials in states that run pilot hemp cultivation programs under an earlier federal provision are weighing in with formal letters to the USDA. “There are 46 states where hemp is legal, and I’m going to say that every single state has raised concerns to us about something within the rule. They might be coming from different perspectives, but every state has raised concerns,” said Aline DeLucia, director of public policy for the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture. Most of the anxiety involves how the federal government plans to test for THC, the high-inducing compound found in marijuana and hemp, both cannabis plants. The

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See Hemp, Page 16

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Subsidies Continued from Page 13 Farmers won’t complain about the MFP payments, said Sickler, the North Dakota farmer. “But I think most farmers would echo, we’d rather have better trade.”

DAKOTA FARMING

AP Photo/Don Ryan, File

A hemp plant is pollinated at the Unique Botanicals facility in Springfield, Ore. Draft rules released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a new and booming agricultural hemp industry have alarmed farmers, processors and retailers across the country, who say the provisions will be crippling if they are not significantly overhauled before they become final.

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This year, spring and fall flooding battered the Dakotas and other Midwestern states. Republican governors in North and South Dakota declared emergencies, and the states received federal disaster relief. Agricultural producers had trouble getting out into saturated fields for spring planting and again months later for fall harvest. Historic flooding and rainfall prevented a record 19.6 million acres from being planted across the country this year. South Dakota led all states with 3.9 million acres, followed by Ohio at 1.6 million acres, Illinois at 1.5 million acres and Missouri at 1.4 million acres. Only two of the top 10 states — Arkansas (1.33 million acres) and Texas (867,000 acres) — are outside the Midwest. Unplanted acres were not eligible for Market Facilitation Program payments. “It’s hard for a farmer to just not plant,” said Krista Joy Swanson, a farmer and visiting research specialist in agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s in your blood. It’s your passion. It’s what you want to do.” But there was still an opportunity for those farmers to receive a Market Facilitation Program payment. They could have filed a claim for “prevented planting,” insurance coverage that protects producers who are unable to plant a crop by a certain date, and subsequently planted a cover crop that was eligible for payment through the program. If they did, they were eligible for payments at the minimum $15 an acre rate. “Those individuals that had the prevent planting came out with a hell of a lot more welfare than anyone else,” said Doug Sombke, president of the South Dakota Farmers Union, “because they

15 | 2020 Ag Journal - Winter

got paid, not only for the prevent planting and their crop insurance, but they also got paid for the loss of marketplace on acres they didn’t grow anything on.” The lack of planting reached local economies beyond farms. If a farmer spends roughly $500 an acre on things such as soil sampling, chemicals and seed sales, that’s $500 multiplied by the prevent planting acres that isn’t being spent with ancillary businesses, Sombke said. “They’re under extreme financial pressure right now,” Sombke said of the other businesses. “But guess what? They don’t have an MFP payment or crop insurance that covers them.” When the agricultural industry suffers, farmers make fewer purchases, said South Dakota state Sen. Arthur Rusch, a Republican. “Our sales tax revenues are lower, which is a big source of revenue here in South Dakota. So, it’s all interconnected.” Rusch introduced a concurrent resolution in January 2019 urging Trump to make agricultural exports a priority and protect agricultural products from tariffs. It was adopted by the Senate but not the House. In her December budget address, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, noted that agriculture faces an uncertain outlook in 2020. The budget did not include discretionary inflation increases for overall K-12 education, Medicaid providers and state employees, among the state’s biggest expenditures. “Her concern is that the revenue isn’t there,” Rusch said, “and that’s largely because of the poor farm economy, which is not entirely due to the trade tariffs, but that has had a significant effect.” As a U.S.-China trade deal looms, there’s hope — along with skepticism that the uncertainty is coming to an end. Even if a deal advances, farmers face a long road ahead. “How do we transition from the end of the trade war, if it ends today, to where the markets catch up?” said Widmar, the agricultural economist. “China is not going to wake up tomorrow and buy all the beans they haven’t bought over the past 18 months.”

Hemp Continued from Page 14 About 80% of the 18,000 farmers licensed for hemp cultivation are in the CBD market, said Eric Steenstra, president of the advocacy group Vote Hemp. The remaining 20% grow hemp for its fiber, used in everything from fabric to construction materials, or its grain, which is added to health foods. But hemp is a notoriously fickle crop. Conditions such as sunlight, moisture and soil composition determine its ratio of THC to CBD. Choosing the right harvesting window is critical to ensuring it stays within acceptable THC levels.

USDA RULES

Under the draft USDA rules, farmers have no wiggle room. They must harvest within 15 days of testing their crop for THC, and the samples must be sent to a lab certified by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Samples must be from the top of the plant, where THC levels are highest, and the final measurement must include not just THC, but also THCA, a nonpsychoactive component. Crops that test above 0.3% for the two combined must be destroyed. Growers with crops above 0.5% would be considered in “negligent violation,” and those with repeated violations could be suspended from farming hemp. In addition, a pilot program for federal crop insurance that would

AP Photo/Don Ryan, File

Trevor Eubanks, plant manager for Big Top Farms, shovels dried hemp as branches hang drying in barn rafters overhead at their production facility near Sisters, Ore. Draft rules released by the United States Department of Agriculture for a new and booming agricultural hemp industry have alarmed farmers, processors and retailers across the country, who say the provisions will be crippling if they are not significantly overhauled before they become final. be available to hemp growers in some states specifies that crops lost because of high THC levels won’t be covered. Those provisions are causing alarm among growers and states with pilot hemp programs allowed under the 2014 Farm Bill. Some states allow THC levels above 0.3%, and not all include THCA in that calculation. Many permit more harvesting time for growers after THC testing. Farmers are lobbying for a 1% THC limit and a 30-day harvest window to give them more flexibility while remaining well under

THC levels that can get people high. The draft regulations don’t “seem to be informed by the reality of the crop,” said Jesse Richardson, who with his brother sells CBD-infused teas and capsules under the brand The Brothers Apothecary. “If no one can produce (federally) compliant hemp flower, then there will be no CBD oil on the market.” Growers are also worried about the proposed rule requiring that all THC testing be done in a DEA-certified lab because there

are so few of them. Some states have only one, which would serve hundreds of growers in a short harvest window. Samantha Ford, a third-generation farmer in North Carolina, waited two weeks to get back THC results from a lab last fall and then spent 45 days harvesting her 1 acre (0.40 hectares) of hemp by hand. “The 15-day window — that’s not feasible, and that was on a small scale,” she said. “I can’t imagine farmers who have acres and acres and acres of it.” Concerns also have emerged about the workload the draft rules would place on states. Many do random sampling for THC levels, but the USDA would require five samples from every hemp lot — a burden for state agricultural departments, said DeLucia, of the national ag agencies group. If federal rules are too onerous and expensive, some states might drop their hemp programs. In those cases, farmers would have to apply for licenses with the USDA, and at this stage it’s unclear how U.S. officials would manage or pay for a nationwide licensing program, DeLucia said. Under the 2018 Farm Bill, the USDA must approve state plans for hemp programs. Louisiana, Ohio and New Jersey last month were the first to get the green light — but those plans might need to be reworked after final rules are written. “What we don’t want to see is states having to write their rules and then have to change the rules again and rewrite them” after 2021, said Steenstra, of Vote Hemp.

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