Kristen Nichols
This column appears in the March edition of Marijuana Business Magazine.
Hemp entrepreneurs have made an art of talking up the plant to people who hate high-THC marijuana. They’re great at explaining how hemp is nonintoxicating and can accomplish great things for the planet, winning over even the biggest cannabis critics.
But the hemp industry needs a little help when it comes to communicating with state-legal marijuana operators. It’s a challenge that threatens to derail hemp’s renaissance before it really gets going.
We all know that new states join the marijuana industry every year. That’s great news for those looking to cash in on business opportunities in new markets and climates.
But the growth of cannabis production at all THC levels—both marijuana and hemp—is causing an increasing number of conflicts that only states can solve.
The Pollen Problem
Most members of the industry know that pollen is a mortal enemy for anyone producing flower rich in cannabinoids such as THC or CBD. Cannabis plants are the lonely hearts club of the plant world; they crank out the most cannabinoids and terpenes when people remove the male plants and leave the females unpollinated.
Because of this, it is crucial for any flower producer to ensure his or her crops won’t be exposed to unwanted pollen.
This problem is not unique to cannabis. Many crops can be damaged by unwanted pollen or pesticide drift, and the nation’s land-grant universities have spent decades conducting great research on commodities such as corn or soybeans.
But when it comes to cannabis, there is precious little information about how far pollen travels. Some say 10 miles. Others say 3 miles. Some insist that pollen can travel 100 miles, depending on wind and geography.
States in the Dark
Agronomists at Michigan State University noted the scanty research on the subject in a 2019 report that called on state regulators to be more forthcoming about farm locations in order to reduce hemp-marijuana conflicts.
Too many jurisdictions still shield the locations of marijuana producers in the name of security. However, decades of state-legal marijuana cultivation have shown that growers face nuisance thefts but not the invasions by drug cartels some predicted at the outset of legalization. It’s frankly silly for a state agriculture department to have no idea where marijuana is growing when it licenses hemp cultivation.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture helped fund an ongoing research project about hemp pollen drift at Virginia Tech. But the federal government is unlikely to throw serious research firepower at cannabis pollen drift when it can instead focus on the development of low-THC cultivars.
This is where states need to step up. Instead of leaving it to private industry to develop cannabis cultivars that won’t produce as much pollen—or keep guesstimating on needed setbacks between male hemp plants and female flower producers—state research institutions should prioritize cannabis pollen drift.
States will find that, by doing so, they’re helping nurture two industries at once: hemp operators and state-legal marijuana growers.
Kristen Nichols can be reached at [email protected].
