The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is actively looking for a device that it can use to determine whether a given cannabis plant is federally legal hemp or still-prohibited marijuana. In a “sources sought” notice published in late February 2019, the agency said that the 2018 Farm Bill, which federally legalized industrial hemp and its derivatives, […]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is giving prospective hemp farmers a status update on the Trump administration’s efforts to regulate the newly legal crop. The plans include a public listening session to be held in March 2019. While the 2018 Farm Bill federally legalized hemp, the USDA has to develop a regulatory process and […]
Farmers (and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) aren’t the only ones who are excited about hemp. According to a recent study, the crop also attracts a variety of bees — and that can help inform ecologically sustainable agriculture practices. For the study, published in February 2019 in the journal Biomass and Bioenergy, researchers at Colorado […]
The 2018 Farm Bill included language federally legalizing hemp, and the authors of that provision told the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in a letter in mid-February 2019 that such policies must be implemented “expeditiously” and “as Congress intended.” “We specifically drafted the Hemp Farming Act in a way that allows hemp pilot states to […]
Industrial hemp production significantly increased in the U.S. in 2018, with farmers cultivating three times as many acres of the crop as compared to the previous year, according to a report released Jan. 28, 2018. Farmers grew more than 78,000 acres of legal hemp last year, the advocacy group VoteHemp reported. In 2017, they grew […]
