While states have been permitted to run hemp programs since 2014, the enormous demand for CBD — which grew an estimated 706% this year — and the legalization of hemp on a federal level have accelerated adoption of the crop. In 2018, the growing season before the new Farm Bill made it legal to plant hemp anywhere in the United States, hemp production in the country tripled. When the 2018 Farm Bill went into effect this season, the growth continued. In Colorado, around 1,200 farmers were granted hemp licenses in 2018. This year, the state department of agriculture told OneZero it had registered about 2,600. Oregon also jumped from around 1,100 farmers to 3,000. In states that had not previously opened their own hemp licensing programs, like Illinois and Kansas, farmers planted for the first time.
“All the sudden in Illinois, it was like, ‘ta da, you’re legal to grow,’” says Winthrop Phippen, a professor of plant breeding and genetics at Western Illinois University. “The permitting process didn’t open until May, so there were last-minute situations.” He only knew of one producer in Illinois selling hemp seed. Instead, “everyone had to outsource from somewhere.”
Some aspiring hemp farmers went on road trips to buy seeds, or bought them online. Many went with the cheapest option, but with the risk that they might be getting duds. “When we talk about corn and soybeans, we’ve got corporations with 50 or 60 breeders working on different traits,” Phippen says. “Most of the hemp stuff has been backdoor, home gardeners working on traits.”
Even a decent hemp seed is only the first step to a viable crop. How much THC a hemp plant produces is affected by environmental factors as well — a seed may perform differently in Kentucky, for instance, than it does in Colorado. Why? Scientists haven’t performed enough research to say. “We’re in the middle of a dry spell here in Kentucky, and people say ‘that’s going to raise the THC level,’” says Bob Pearce, a professor at the University of Kentucky who leads the school’s hemp research program. “We don’t really know that for sure… We can infer from our experience with other crops, but we don’t know that hemp will work in the same way.”
For crops like soybeans and corn, farmers can buy seed that produces a plant with known characteristics that is certified by a third-party who ensures it is grown according to set standards. But high-CBD varieties come almost exclusively from the United States, which has only had federally legal hemp for a year — not enough time to determine if a variety is eligible to be certified by the Association of Official Seed Certifying Agencies (AOSCA).
In order for a plant variety to be eligible for certification, plant breeders must take carefully documented steps to prove that it is distinct, that it has uniform characteristics, and that it is stable from one generation to the next, meaning that over time, each generation looks and performs as the previous one. It involves growing multiple generations of plants and running trials to understand what climate, growing season length, and other factors they require. “It has not been uncommon for us to get calls from a seed vendor saying, ‘I have hemp seed, it’s this variety, it’s ready for sale, I want you to certify,’” says Chet Boruff, AOSCA’s CEO. “We can’t do that, because we don’t know where it came from, we really don’t know what variety it was, nobody there was to watch over it and make sure it maintained varietal purity.”
“Plant breeders are working overtime right now to develop consistent, low-THC varieties that will work in the marketplace,” Boruff says, but in the meantime, “there are a lot of people who are trying to sell seed and take advantage of this excited marketplace and farmers end up buying seed that is low quality and, in the worst case scenario, has a [illegally] high THC level.” Commercially available seeds tested by Smart regularly sprout at well below the rate promised by their sellers. One hemp variety from Oregon only germinated at a 39% rate, according to a presentation Smart gave at Cornell that was later posted online.
Meanwhile, since both CBD and THC in a plant increase over time as it grows, most farmers who buy even otherwise high-quality seed are still caught playing a game of chicken: They want to leave their plants in the field long enough to maximize CBD. But if they wait too long to harvest, they’ll end up with too much THC — and a crop that has to be destroyed.