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It’s the wild, wild west for Illinois hemp growers
By Zeta Cross
THE CENTER SQUARE
Hemp legalization set off a “gold rush” of hemp cultivation by enthusiastic growers across the country. Four years later, a significant number of hemp growers have left the business. And the amount of planted hemp acreage has dropped considerably.
The Farm Bill of 2018 legalized the growing of hemp in the United States for the first time since the 1970s. Hemp and hemp seeds were taken off the Drug Enforcement Administration’s schedule of controlled substances.
But despite the legalization, hemp growers are facing many challenges. Those who are still at it are always adapting as the government considers regulations and farmers struggle to find processors.
As a researcher and a commercial agriculture administrator with the University of Illinois Extension, Phil Alberti advises hemp growers across Illinois. He sympathizes with the growers as they try to navigate the emerging hemp market and the evolving regulations.
“We are in a very infant industry and we have a long way to go,” Alberti, an enthusiastic advocate for the fledgling hemp industry, told The Center Square.
Alberti compares growing hemp today to growing corn in the 1920s and 1930s.
“We’re figuring out the genetics. We’re figuring out best management practices,” Alberti said.
When a farmer grows corn today, the farmer knows where the elevator is to go to sell the corn, Alberti said. Prices are structured. Corn futures give farmers an idea of future prices.
“We don’t have that with hemp,” Alberti said. “There is not a repository for processing. It just hasn’t developed yet.”
There are not enough processing facilities where the hemp can be turned into crude oil and flour. Hemp growers are running into bottlenecks at harvest time if they don’t have processing lined up before they start growing
“That is still shaking out to this day,” Alberti said.
Government regulation is another hurdle for hemp growers. In 2022, in-person field testing was mandated, much to the chagrin of growers. Hemp growers can no longer send samples of their hemp in for testing. Growers are now required to pay for the time and travel costs of getting testers to their farms to gather samples. Some growers are paying as much as $1,000 for required tests, Alberti said.
The change has hurt hemp growers’ bottom lines.
Rules and regulations will continue to change, Alberti said. 2023 promises to bring new requirements. Alberti said he is encouraged that state and federal government regulators are anxious to evaluate new research and are listening to growers’ comments. But growers continue to pay the price for operating in a changing marketplace.
Hemp has a great deal of promise as animal feed, Alberti said. Hemp is a fast growing, nutritious crop with deep roots that can outcompete a lot of weeds. Hemp requires only half the amount of nitrogen fertilizer that corn does. Alberti gets a lot of inquiries from livestock farmers who are interested in growing it, he said. Unfortunately, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is still wrestling with the safety of allowing animals destined for slaughter to eat hemp.
“What’s fascinating is that people can buy hemp hearts and hemp hulls and eat them and feed them to children, but right now it is illegal to feed them to animals that are raised for human consumption,” Alberti said.
The ability to grow hemp for livestock feed remains on hold until the FDA decides on guidelines, he said.
Getty Images The Farm Bill of 2018 legalized the growing of hemp in the United States for the first time since the 1970s. Hemp and hemp seeds were taken off the Drug Enforcement Administration’s schedule of controlled substances.
disease and the need for antibiotics — and allows various species to be raised year-round in landlocked areas.
The method is costly, though, precluding many small- and mid-size farmers. Searcy, whose farm runs entirely on the technology, cautioned that the operation is also completely dependent on electricity. Environmental activists argue that recirculating aquaculture systems require abundant water resources, and they voice concerns about the disposal of waste.
Tyler Isaac, aquaculture program manager for Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch, said that with sustainably sourced fish feed and proper precautions, the recirculating systems could lead to more fish farms in the Midwest.
“It’s always a game of tradeoffs, but I think at the end of the day, recirculating systems are a really good step forward,” Isaac said, adding that renewable energy sources would also make such operations more environmentally friendly. “The development of an aquaculture industry in a place like the Midwest is a good thing. It just needs to be done with appropriate safeguards.”
Morris said other emerging technologies — such as AquaBounty’s genetically modified Atlantic salmon being grown in Indiana that grow faster and are less susceptible to disease — could also be “very attractive for producers,” although it could be “several years” before similar genetically altered fish become mainstream.
“In terms of Midwest aquaculture overall, the growth has got to be with the food-fish operation. That’s where your market is — a consumer basis,” Morris said. “There are only so many ponds to stock out in the Midwest, only so many anglers. But there are consumers wanting to eat more and more fish in Midwest. We have to focus on that.” es from around the country, begging for boxes of whatever fruit he would sell them.
His entire business went online, and Miami Fruit was born.
Other fruit-obsessed growers invited him onto their YouTube channels, which is where Schlegel saw him and commented, “Beautiful!” She meant the fruit, but also him.
“He seemed like a cool, fruity guy,” she said.
Schlegel had grown up the youngest of three sisters raised by a firefighter mom and police officer dad. Her mother died when she was 7, and it was up to her father, Ed, to encourage his youngest when she started planting fruits and vegetables in a corner of their yard because she wanted her family to eat better.
“Pretty soon there was fruit all over the house,” said Ed Schlegel. “She started talking about ‘sustainable this, organic that.’”
The day she tasted a mango for the first time, at a farmers market near her house when she was 15, “I became a fruit snob,” she said. By 16 she was vegan.
She sought out a college that offered instruction in how to raise tropical fruits and attended the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
When Rane mentioned in a YouTube video he was visiting, she messaged him and they met up. A year later, he visited her again when she was home from college.
“And that’s when we fell in love,” she said.
She liked and followed him — on social media and IRL.
She left school. And they drove cross country and moved into a trailer in the backyard of his mother’s house, where they started selling a bounty of fruit to Rane’s small but devoted group of customers around the country.
Edelle built Miami Fruit a simple, functional, Shopify website that made it easy to take orders. And she took over all the social media, including Instagram, posting as much as three times a day, where that audience has grown to more than 359,000 followers. She started a daily newsletter.
In two years, they had raised enough money to buy 2.5 acres of fruit farmland for $150,000 from the late tropical fruit advocate Bill Lessard, the founding president of the Tropical Fruit and Vegetable Society.
Lessard financed their dream with a one-year, interest-free loan. He kept his neighboring five acres and became a mentor and a friend. When Lessard died after a long battle with cancer in the summer of 2020, he left written in his trust that the young couple should have the first chance to buy the land, and the house in which he lived, at market price.
On that land, they started experimenting with tropical varieties of fruits they can grow in a slightly cooler sub-tropical climate. They focused on fruits that were not grown by the multinational growers, couldn’t be imported and fruits that wouldn’t stand up to the rigors of the global supply chain.
They chose fruits like atemoya or guanabana that can’t be picked too early, ripen quickly and bruise easily. They’re terrible choices for large growers, who have to ensure fruits can stand up to a week of travel. But they’re perfect for small, local farmers who can raise the best fruit for flavor — not hardiness — and ship them within a day or two. They could bypass the traditional supply chain.
“The goal is always to offer stuff that’s special,” Roatta said.
The couple built a cold storage, a refrigeration room and packing area out of recycled Chiquita banana shipping containers. They contracted with a local company to make the shipping boxes out of recycled paper, and Miami Fruit’s staff of about 20 handmakes the packing material out of biodegradable materials.
They worked with independent farmers, most of them in South Florida, encouraging them to grow rare tropical fruits Roatta and Schlegel proved could grow on their land.
Why grow common avocados paid at 20 cents a pound, Roatta told them, when you could grow something unique — like a variety of a longneck avocado or a rare purple sugar apple that caught the internet’s attention — and demand $5 a pound? Some turned over parts of their land to grow for Miami Fruit.
When critics ask why their fruit is so expensive — a box can cost over $100 — they stress paying farmers whatever they ask so they can continue growing quality, sustainable fruit at a fair wage. (They even made a TikTok about it.)
“He does such a service to Redland growers by buying that quality fruit and selling that quality fruit all over the United States,” said Chafin, who offers 75 varieties of bananas from his farm, including the Blue Java.
Their business was climbing every month — then COVID hit. While some businesses ground to a halt, theirs, which is all online, took off.
People suddenly at home with nowhere to go found the TikTok account Schlegel had started for Miami Fruit in October 2019. They found Schlegel, blonde and coquettish, creating short, fun videos that showed off the rare fruit as Rane harvested it. She often wore graphic T-shirts she had designed for the company, starring anthropomorphic fruit she’d drawn.
All her life she had said she wanted to be an artist, then a farmer, then an “artist farmer,” her father recalled.
“As it turns out, she did turn into a farming artist,” he said.
to a 2015 rule that followed an extensive rulemaking process and a comprehensive peer-reviewed scientific assessment. The Trump administration then replaced the 2015 rule with a rule of its own that largely adopted the Scalia approach. The Biden administration has proposed a new rule that would deem waters of the United States present if either a significant nexus or continuous surface connection is present.
What’s at stake
The court’s ultimate ruling in Sackett could offer lower courts, regulatory agencies and landowners clear direction on the meaning of “waters of the United States.” And it will likely affect the government’s ability to protect the nation’s waters.
A broad interpretation could include many agricultural ditches and canals, which might obligate some farmers and ranchers to apply for Section 404 permits. It could also ensure oversight of polluters who discharge pollutants upstream of federally protected waters.
The Sacketts assert that the permitting process imposes significant costs, delays and potential restrictions on property use. In response, the Biden administration contends that most landowners can proceed under general permits that impose relatively modest costs and burdens.
In my view, this court’s anti-regulatory bent — and the fact that no other justices joined Kennedy’s concurring Rapanos opinion — suggest that this case will produce a narrow reading of “waters of the United States.” Such an interpretation would undercut clean water protections across the country.
If the court requires a continuous surface connection, federal protection would no longer apply to many areas that critically affect the water quality of U.S. rivers, lakes and oceans — including seasonal streams and wetlands that are near or intermittently connected to larger water bodies. It might also mean that building a road, levee or other barrier separating a wetland from other nearby waters may be enough to remove an area from federal protection.
Congress could clarify what the Clean Water Act means by “waters of the United States,” but past efforts to legislate a definition have fizzled. And today’s closely divided Congress is unlikely to fare any better. The court’s ruling in Sackett could offer the final word on this issue for the foreseeable future.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license location this year, compared with 15 in 2021.
By the end of the afternoon, with the sun almost set, Moorhead-Wallace and Wallace left with multiple bags full of nest material to fill their structures. They also left some nests at the farm, and a neighbor across the street brought one home for her own yard.
A DIY nest
Handmade wooden pollinator habitats can fetch a high price online. But making a nest on your own takes just a few steps and some household materials following Moorhead-Wallace’s approach. Here’s what you’ll need: • Hollow and dry twigs, branches, stems and other plant materials • Twine, yarn or a cardboard toilet paper roll • A dry spot outside
After gathering the plant material, cut them down to between 6 and 8 inches, Moorhead-Wallace said. (Insects are likely to burrow in at most around 5 inches.) Then gather them together with the twine, yarn or bunched in an old toilet paper roll.
The nest can be placed in a structure that you can decorate, such as a box made of wood or cardboard. Or, you can place the nest as is outside, ideally in a sunny and dry spot, such as under an overhang. You can also place it under a porch, or if you don’t have a yard, on the edge of a fire escape, MoorheadWallace said.
Another way to make your garden friendly to pollinators is to plant native vegetation, which could bring some less common bees to your garden, Molumby said.
You can also leave the soil untilled and free of mulch or gravel for bees that nest underground, Minor said.
As a rule of thumb, if it looks like the opposite of a manicured lawn, pollinators will love it, Molumby said.
