 Thank you for joining us for tonight's webinar, Industrial Hemp and Option for the Adelaide Hills. My name is Tasha McGregor and I'm with the Department of Primary Industries and Regions and I'll be your host for the evening's webinar. Before I introduce our speaker, I'd just like to cover a few housekeeping points. So as you will see from this screen, there's a couple of options here for you to make your webinar tonight a bit more enjoyable. So firstly in the bottom left-hand corner there, you can adjust your audio settings. Just in the middle there on the bottom of the scroll bar, there's a Q&A and we ask this is how you interact with us tonight in terms of questions. We're going to hold questions at the end of the event when our speaker has finished his presentation. But please feel free to enter questions in the Q&A section at any time. You'll also see at the top of the toolbar there that you can also adjust your screen. I would also need to let you know that tonight's webinar is being recorded and we will share the link with you as soon as possible. Before I introduce our speaker for tonight's webinar, I'd like to introduce John Tons and I'd also like to acknowledge Miranda Hampton who's a very important Cuddly Creek Community Recovery Officer who's also online with us tonight. Then we'll hand over to John. John is a representative on the Cuddly Creek Community Reference Group and he has instigated the idea of growing industrial hemp in the Adelaide Hills. So John, would you like to give us an outline of what you're hoping to get out of tonight's webinar? Well this happened as a result of people asking how can we recover quickly from the bushfires because quite a few of our growers had lost substantial holdings of fruit which meant five-year recovery. When somebody came up with the idea of industrial hemp, which has got a faster turnaround, it seemed an idea that was too good to be true. So we decided to do some learning. In the course of that we discovered that HRSA had already done a lot of work on it. So as a result, tonight's meeting is basically to find out if this is a viable option. Is there a crit in it for people? Can they afford to set it up? And if there is, then well and good we'll be able to go ahead. So we're all looking forward to learning from you here at the Lenswood Post Office. We've got about eight people in the room and I will be putting their questions through at the end of it if they've got any questions. Okay, enjoy the evening. Excellent, thanks John for that. So we've got a pretty good speaker for tonight's webinar. Let me introduce him for you. Mark Skews is a research scientist with SARDI. Mark joined the South Australian Department of Agriculture in 1986 and currently works for the South Australian Research and Development Institute, otherwise known as SARDI, at the Lockston Research Centre. Mark has many years experience in all the aspects of irrigated crop management, including irrigation scheduling and soil and plant water monitoring. But while we have specifically asked him to speak with us tonight, Mark has extensive experience in conducting industrial hemp research trials since 2017-18 at locations across South Australia, which has included the limestone coast and the Riverland. So Mark, I'm now going to hand it over to you and let you start tonight's presentation. Thank you, Tasha. Hopefully everyone can now see my screen. Hang on, if I hit that button. Now hopefully everyone can see the presentation. So thank you for the kind introduction, Tasha. I'm a bit worried about the extensive experience. Certainly before 2017, I had had exactly no experience with growing hemp of any shape or form. So it has been quite a new experience for me. But I've learned a few things along the way, and I guess I'm here tonight to share some of those learnings and to give people an opportunity to understand what might be possible and what might be involved in getting into growing industrial hemp. If I just get this to work, there we go. We have been doing hemp trials since 2017-18, and I'll just give a little bit of background as to those trials, but then I'll pull some of the information in that we've gathered under other headings. So initially the background to what we've been doing back in 1995, there was some industrial hemp grown with looking to grow for fibre across four locations across the state, one of which included in the South-East at Khyber Bow Light Research Station. That was a once-off and really didn't ever go any further. It wasn't until 2017 when the Industrial Hemp Act was passed, and the Office of Industrial Hemp and Medicinal Cannabis was established in May 2017 with the passing of that Act, that it became possible for people to grow or to apply for a licence initially to grow industrial hemp in South Australia. And in November 2017 was when the Act was proclaimed, and so it became legal and people were able to put in an application. And also there was, that happened to coincide with the approval of hemp seed for human consumption and prior to that hemp seed was only ever able to be used for stock food or for making oil, pressing for oil. It wasn't supposed to be sold for human consumption. There was plenty of canary food eaten by people bought at the health food shops, but it wasn't legal to sell it for human consumption. So the focus of our research based on that new legislation and the new opportunity for people to apply for licence and grow industrial hemp, we saw an immediate market for grain as food, as a target in use. So we focused on that in terms of the types of varieties that we were looking at and the majority of the analysis that we had done. But we did also assess the fibre and herd production of the varieties that we were growing. And interesting to note that there are varieties that are specifically for seed. There are some varieties that are specifically for fibre and herd production. There are varieties that are known as dual purpose and in some cases triple purpose where you can also grow CBD or they will produce high levels of CBD. So some of the varieties are more specialised than others. We were looking to compare different varieties under local growing conditions. South Australian conditions. We're interested in looking at different times of sowing and how that would work in South Australia. We had some geographic or climatic comparison with two different sites. We were looking at summer irrigated production, which really fits best with the growing, the ideal growing season for hemp. And we were looking at, we did fully replicated research trials so their results are robust and you can rely on the information that we're generating. So far in the last three years we've trialled a whole lot of different varieties and these are those listed here. And we've got a few more, five new ones this year that we're looking at. And there's different origins for these varieties. They've got different seasons. Some have male and female separate plants. Some have male and female flowers on the same plant. There's the grain and fibre usage. And then the THC levels which are quoted for all these different varieties. And I've just highlighted a couple of them there, less than 0.3% for a couple of Chinese varieties. We'll come back to that later. So what's the agronomy of hemp? So I've just thrown a few different things together here. Here's where our trial sites have been. So we've been growing hemp at Loxton for the last three years, not this year. In the first year, 2017-18, we grew at Kybe Bowl Lights. We had some issues there which I'll go into some of that shortly as well. But after 2017-18, we actually moved our site to Mayope, which is near Kunawara and onto a Grower's property there where conditions were more favourable. And we've had trials there for the last two years and again this year. Sowing times, we looked at a number of different sowing times. So in the first year, we had quite a wide spread. We were planting from late October into the middle of January. We narrowed that down as we went. And now we're really planting November, December as being, seem to be the ideal times for planting hemp. Soil guidelines. Free draining is the main thing. Hemp doesn't like to be waterlogged. One of the issues we had at Kybe Bowl Light was that the soil is quite heavy clay. We had a rainfall event in fact that created some runoff and some of our plots got flooded. And that pretty much knocked out all our trial plants. So that was a major issue. Good seed to soil contact and note here, the seed is shown at the sown very shallowly. 10 to 20 mils because it does have trouble getting out of the ground. And if you're so too deep, the plants just won't make it out of the ground and you will get nothing. And control weeds prior to sowing. So we have issues here with cow-trop. This year we've had some grass issues. Once the hemp's up and away, it will shade out most weeds. But in the initial stages, it can be a bit slight to get going. And if other weeds get ahead of it, it can be a pretty difficult situation to address. Planting density. So this slide sort of correlates with the last slide in a sense in that we aimed in the first season for 75 plants a square metre. In the second season we aimed for 100 plants per square metre. And mostly we didn't achieve that. We did at Myope achieve 100 and plus plants per square metre in 2018-19. But we struggled in the other years to get the sort of level that we were looking for. And that was mostly to do with the germination and establishment of small plants. And we had some issues in that, you know, was a problem. But if you can aim for that 75 to 100 plants per square metre, and that's the seed production, interestingly the recommendations for fibre production are even higher. Up to 300, 350 plants per square metre, which is very close. But you're aiming there for very narrow stems, pardon me, and for therefore a lot of a high proportion of fibre because the fibre is around the outside of the stem, not up through the middle. The life cycle of hemp is a bit variable. And this is variety driven. It's also to do with time of planting and the local conditions. And you'll see there that some varieties, if you plant them earlier, they will flower earlier and you harvest them earlier. Other varieties, it doesn't matter as, you know, if you plant them earlier, if you plant them later, they will actually just keep growing until they reach a certain day length is what they're looking for. And then that will trigger flowering and then you get harvest some time after that. And so that has implications in terms of when you want to plant different varieties. It has implications on how big the plants are going to get and therefore how easy they are going to be to harvest. Because something that's three metres in the air is a bit difficult to harvest without taking the whole plant and that's a problem. I'll talk about that a bit more later as well. Area of crop. So this was something that was in some of the information that John was sending around as one of the questions to ask. And I don't have a good answer as to what is the minimum area of crop you need. Apart for economically that is, apart from the legislative requirement that if you have a licence, you're growing at least one hectare of crop. And that's more about avoiding backyard people who are growing industrial hemp and inverted commas so they can grow a few wooby weed plants in amongst them. So that's really where that number has come from. The considerations that you need to think about though in terms of the economics and the area that you're going to plant is what irrigation system if you've got available, what area can you cover with that? But also how much water do you have? And I'll go into that shortly. But water availability will limit the area. What suitable land do you have? So it needs to be reasonably level. It needs to be free draining and able to be irrigated. And then you need to look at costs and returns. And I don't have good information on that, unfortunately at this point. And it's partly because it is a bit of a moving feast, particularly on the return side. And the market is fairly young, undeveloped. And so it's not easy to say, yes, you'll be earning so much per tonne. So irrigation. Most of the commercial growers currently growing hemp in South Australia are using centre pivots. And that's partly to do with the type of growers that are getting into hemp. So there's a fair few growers down in the Southeast, the mixed crop growers with centre pivots that they put different rotations of crops through, small seeds and the like. And so they're just fitting hemp into their rotation under their existing centre pivot systems. Overhead sprinklers are the way that we're doing our trials. At Kibe we did use a big gun irrigator, but that was fairly uneven application. So it didn't work particularly well. It also had a pretty high application rate. So overhead sprinklers seem to be working. And there is one grower in the Riverland who has grown a crop so far. And he used sprinklers as well. So it is possible. I wouldn't recommend Grip, mainly because of the densities we're talking about. And you can see a trial there on the right, see how close together the rows of hemp are planted. So you're going to need a lot of dripper lines. And I don't think it's going to be economical. Here's some water use information from our trials. And you can see there, this is irrigation plus rainfall for Lockston on the left and Kibe Borlite and Mayope on the right. So Riverland and Southeast. Numbers ranging there from, depending on the variety, as little as a couple of hundred millimetres, so two megalitres per hectare, that would equate to, up to over 10 megs a hectare, over 12 megs a hectare for a sun there of 1,200 millimetres. And that's to do with growing season. So those 1,200 meg... Sorry, 1,200 millimetre crops are crops that were planted early. They didn't flower until quite late. So they just kept growing and using water for months on end, before they actually produced anything. And so planting them later is a better idea in terms of both water use and also the size of the plants you've got to deal with at the end of it. I've put some information through a crop water requirement tool that we have, and these are some rough numbers that I've come up with. Now I wouldn't get too excited about these as being exact, they are an average year. They include an average rainfall, and this is what's left as irrigation requirement. So in a low rainfall year, you're going to need more than this. In a hotter year, you're going to need more. So I've put a general recommendation there that you want to have at least six or seven megs per hectare available, before you could reliably grow a hemp crop, because if you get halfway through and you've got to turn the water off, that is going to affect your yield, and therefore your return fairly savagely. So that's a rough guideline for the Adelaide Hills from what I can determine, but yeah, it is fairly rubbery at this point. And it will depend on some of those issues of the varieties you're using, the time you're sowing for some of the varieties and so on. The other issue about water is salinity, and this is our cobbibolite site, and the burn you can see on these plants is actually to do with salt. So these plants were being irrigated with a big gun irrigator. Early in the season, we had some good rainfall, we had lots of soil moisture, and so they were only getting a small amount of their water from the irrigation, and so mostly they survived okay and established well, but the later plantings really suffered because they were getting all of their water from the irrigation and it was quite salty. 1200 parts per million was the rough salinity of that water, and they didn't cope. You can see there the larger plants starting to recover and grow through, but a lot of plants have been killed already before they got to that height and to that size, and really hemp, young hemp seedlings, as they first come out of the ground, are pretty soft. They don't like heat, they don't like salt, they don't like being buried when they're trying to get out of the ground, but once you get them up and established, they're actually pretty hardy and will grow and drink as much water as you can give them really, and they'll do okay. Question was asked or was posed by John about what sort of equipment might be needed for hemp growing, and it's not as bad as you might think. So we're using an air seeder to sow our trials, and this is the air seeder we're using down at the Southeast trial, and air seeders are generally recommended, and you'll notice the note there about low fan speed to avoid damaging seed. So the worst thing you can do is have really high fan speed, smash the grains through the pipe down into the ground, and as they rattle through, they crack the seed casing and they won't grow. So nice and slow on the air, maybe a bit slow on the ground speed as well to compensate, and there's no reason you can't use any air seeder that will plant any other crop. Again though, shallow. So setting it up so that you can get the seed to be quite close to the surface. The biggest issue we have here at Loxton with our sandy soils is creating deep furrows. The seed might be not very far below the surface when we plant it, but we get a nice north wind and the furrows or the mounds collapse into the furrows and bury everything, another inch or two under the ground and that's goodbye to the crop. So yeah, sewing shallow is the key. In terms of harvest, most modern harvesters will do the job. Draper header fronts are preferred, but auger headers will do the job. Again, slowly is the word because you'll be aware that hemp has these wonderful fibers that will incredibly strong, but if you try and cut those or bundle them through a header and they're in too much of a hurry, they'll all just ball up, wrap around things and you can stop your harvest very quickly by getting everything wrapped in hemp fiber. So slowly, there's recommendations around I'll show you some sources later, but basically slowly open everything up as much as possible to try and help the fiber to work through the machine rather than getting caught. And the less of the plant, you can harvest the better. So if you can get a nice even stand of hemp that is all similar height and the flowering heads are all at a similar height and you can just take the flower heads off, that will minimize your issues. If you've got to take a whole lot of plant because half your crop is down near the ground, that just increases the amount of that fiber that you've got to put through the machine and that increases the chances that something's going to go wrong. Products and markets. Here's a photo from our first season of some of the different varieties. You can see there we've got some plants that were up to three meters tall. We've got some others that are quite a bit smaller and quite a bit different looking. They're much more narrow, not as much leaf on them. So that sort of reflects this grain versus jewel-purpose type of crop. So the tall ones are more jewel-purpose. You can get grain from them, but they will also produce fiber. The short ones are more specialized for grain and they don't grow much biomass. So depending on what you want to do, variety is very important. This is the same year and it's the crop height that the first planting, the first sowing time reached. And so you can see they're over three meters for some of them. And we had basically two varieties there that flowered early, went to seed and in effect stopped growing when they started to flower. We had three other varieties that just kept growing until they got that day length signal to the flower and to set seed. And so they just kept growing and growing and growing. So I don't know how you harvest a crop at three meters with a normal harvester. There are machines available to do that where you can get the cutting head up to three, four, five meters off the ground. But that's a specialized machine. So you're probably not wanting to go there as you can use generally available equipment. Yields. So these are the dry matter yields. So this is the total above ground biomass that we harvested. Everything above the ground cut off and weighed, dried and weighed. And you can see there up to 20 tonne de hectare of dry matter in some of the plots. Again though, the taller varieties, the varieties that grew for longer and went into flowering late produced a lot more dry matter. And the varieties that just went to seed quickly produced small plants and then mostly flower head. The dry matter is a whole lot less with those. Of that dry matter though, there's a few different components. So grain yield. We've had some, in odd plots, we've had some pretty impressive results. But really around one to two tonnes per hectare is reasonable to expect, but perhaps not immediately. And a lot of the growers that we have already in the industry are finding that hemp is difficult to grow. And if I've been told by other people from other countries and other states where they've been doing this for longer, if you can get a tonne de hectare in the first couple of years, you're doing really well. And a lot of our growers got close to that in the first year. So they did okay. But those are the sort of numbers that you can expect long term. You will notice particularly in the bottom graph there, which is the 2018-19 graph, Loxton grain yield, the highest yielding varieties are the yellow, green and orange. On the right-hand side of my hope, it was the red, brown and blue varieties that yielded best. And those colours are consistent for a variety between the two graphs. So it's different varieties that are working in the southeast to the ones that are working up here in the Riverland. And so there is a bit of, probably a bit of background work, a bit of trial work needed to actually find out what the best varieties might be for the Adelaide Hills, because it may not be the same ones as are working in the southeast. It may not be the ones that are working here in the Riverland. It might be some other combination, pardon me. Fibre and herge yield. So we had the stalks sent off to the CSIRO in Geelong, and they extracted fibre from those stalks and they did a fibre yield and a herd yield. So you can see the fibre yields there around a tonne to two tonnes for the fibre or the dual purpose varieties. And then the herd, much higher numbers. So we're talking there up to above 10 tonnes per hectare of herd as a product separated from the fibre. So those are the numbers we're getting. How they exactly conform to commercial yields, I'm not really sure, because we haven't had that in South Australia. There's been no herd and fibre production in South Australia so far. Having produced those different products, there's a whole lot of different uses, and I've just pulled this out of the internet to give some idea of the different products that are available to produce from these different parts of the plant. So we've got the stalk, produces fibre, it produces herd, and there's some different uses for each of those. We've got the seed on the right. There's leaves and flowers and roots, but generally speaking, we don't bother digging up the roots and the leaves pretty much fall off as you go, they self shade, and by the time you're harvesting the seed, everything's pretty much desiccated. So you're really not getting anything there. If you're wanting to grow the flowers for CBD production, that's a completely different story. I know nothing about it. It's also a Commonwealth license rather than a state license. What's interesting though is the path to market for these different components. So fibre and herd, there's a decortication step required to actually separate the fibre and the herd. That's quite labour intensive if you want to do it by hand, extremely labour intensive. Or you need some pretty pricey machinery and pretty much you've got to replicate something like a cotton gin to actually do that separation. There is currently no plant available in South Australia to do that. So you're looking at transporting quite a long way into Victoria. And the cost of transport is actually prohibitive because raw harvested hemp plants are very light. Apparently the figure I was given was that a bale of hemp weighs about a third the amount of a bale of normal straw. So you're paying a lot of money to transport not very much material. So for the fibre herd market to really take off in South Australia, there's some major investment required. And I don't know whether that's likely in the near future. I don't know is the answer. Grain or nut seed, whatever you want to call it. There is little processing required. There is some processing but it's really fairly simple, relatively speaking. There is a local processor already established at Bordetown who is taking most of the crop that's being produced in the Southeast. And it's a whole lot less expensive to set up than to court occasions. So there is much more likelihood that other people will set up processing for seed. All that existing small seed processes could branch out into hemp without a lot of additional cost. Transport is still a limitation but a truckload of hemp seed does weigh a heck of a lot more than a truckload of hemp plants. So it's not so bad. And so that is that path to market is available now. Obviously currently transporting to Bordetown is probably a bit of an issue but it's a lot closer and a lot easier to get into that market than into the fiber herd market. THC, I did refer, I did mention earlier I was going to come to this. THC limits for a crop that you are growing to produce a product. So grain or fiber or herd, it will be tested at the appropriate time by Perza and the standard is less than 1% THC in that crop. If it's more than 1%, it will need to be destroyed. If it's close to 1%, they'll probably want to do a bit of more investigation to work out what's actually going on. So that 1% is pretty important. If you're growing a crop and you want to keep some of the seed to re sow next year, it actually needs to be less than 0.5% THC and that's because there is natural variation around those numbers and if you grow a crop that is just less than 1% this year but you keep the seed and re sow it, it could go above 1% next year. So it's really just an insurance thing but if you want to keep seed for re-seowing or any seed that you want to buy for sowing has to come from certified plants that are less than 0.5% THC. So having said that, referring back to the numbers I showed before of the quoted THC numbers for some of these varieties, here's the THC results we got this last year for our trials plots. You can see most of the varieties there are less than 0.5, well less than 0.5, a lot of them are less than 0.1. Hanif and Qhananee, the two Chinese varieties, we had some plots that were actually well over 1%, we had some plots that were right on 1% or just below, even the lowest ones at 0.6, 0.68 is too close, too high. So although those varieties actually yield quite well, grow nicely, I really wouldn't recommend people grow them because you're going to find yourself in this situation where that crop is gonna have to be destroyed because it's outside of the legal requirements for an industrial hemp crop in South Australia. More information, if you want to go and find some more information for yourself, the PURSA website is a good place to start. So pyr.sa.gov.au, the site will look something like this and if you click on this primary industries or hover over the primary industries link, you'll get a dropdown. On that dropdown is industrial hemp. If you click there, you'll go to a page which has a lot of information, it has links. Some of the things you can access there include a trial report, which is recently updated on our South Australian industrial hemp trial. So that's got data from the three years that we've been doing the trials so far. There's also a fact sheet that I've put together with information that we've collected plus from other sources. There's also information there about how to get a license, what the requirements are and so on. The other resource I would direct you to is a website of the Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance. So it's www.hemptrade.ca and they have a hemp production e-guide and there's a lot of information in there. It is a different production system in that they're doing, they're not irrigating, it's broad acre. Their climate is obviously somewhat different to ours, but a lot of the information in there is actually still relevant and it's a really good resource. So I suggest that if you are seriously interested in pursuing a growing industrial hemp that you visit that site and check it out, you can learn a lot from there. Okay, that is my presentation. I'll hand back to Tasha. Excellent, thanks Mark. I'll just take back control of the screen. And we have had a few questions come through Mark so we'll just work through these questions but if you're currently in the audience and you want to propose a question to Mark please pop it in the question and answer box and I will ask Mark to answer it. First few are just around the comments that you made with harvesting. There's just been a general comment about Tasmanian growers have had some issues with harvesting due to coming up. And then another suggestion was canola is windrowed. Is that a technique that could potentially be used in harvesting hemp? There has been some windrowing done I believe in hemp. The problem with windrowing is that the seed when it gets mature it actually falls out of the head quite easily. And I didn't talk about maturity and harvest timing but the seed doesn't all mature at the same time. And so what you kind of end up doing is making a bit of a judgment call between some of the seeds still green but some of the seeds starting to fall off and end up on the ground. And so you need to get in and get what you can. So windrowing is a bit of a problem in that it's just going to result in more seed on the ground and so it's not commonly carried out. I think there's a bit of some people who desiccate the crop but of course how you do that, what chemical you can use when you're about to harvest straight away and given that it's now a food crop, that's pretty problematic as well. So... And the comment around gumming up, Mark, have you had any information from the Tasmanian groves? I haven't come across that particularly. I think it's probably just in the general course of harvest is a real pain and difficult and you've just got to go really slowly and be really careful. So gumming and fibre and so on are all just issues to try and deal with. If you're harvesting too green, I can imagine that that would be more of an issue. And so I think people probably tend to wait. They lose a bit of crop on the ground but they wait for everything to dry out a bit more before they send the harvester in. And certainly some of the samples we've sent in for analysis, we've got the feedback that they're actually a bit green. So I think waiting longer is probably more the option for commercial growers but that does mean that they're going to lose some crop on the ground before harvest. And it is interesting, there is like a truism in the industry apparently that the time to harvest is when you start seeing baby plants growing. So they're coming from the seed you've just grown and has fallen into the ground and is germinating and popping out of the ground. So then you know that it's time to harvest. Another question here, Mark. Has there been any genetic breeding trials for SA conditions being undertaken? No, no, we don't have the ability to do that. There's been a lot of breeding work done around the world. There are a couple of companies in Australia doing some breeding work and a lot of selection work where different varieties have been brought in from overseas and then selected for our conditions. Because there is a lot of genetic variability. hemp is not well tamed like wheat and barley and the sort of normal crops that we used to. It has a lot of variability in it, it's still a bit wild. And so a variety isn't always a variety. It can be a bit of a mix of things. So there's been some of the Australian companies have done some breeding but they've done a lot of selection of European and Canadian varieties to come up with varieties that are pure lines that do well in Australian conditions but nothing specific to South Australia. Thanks for that. Another one here. When you were talking about THC it was quite interesting to see that those Chinese varieties in particular were producing over that 1 or 0.1%. Is this a combination of genetic and the environment or what determines the level of THC? Yeah, it is genetic and the environment. So a lot of the companies will give test results for their varieties. The Chinese just give this sort of statement certificate. Yes, it's less than 0.3 and that's the standard line. They don't ever say it's less than 0.1 or anything. It's just they're all less than 0.3 because that's a fairly common limit across the world. But that means nothing, apparently. But it is, we've had some quite different results from the same variety, both in the different locations and also at different times of sowing. And some of the research or background reading that I've done suggests that stress increases THC content or cannabinoid content. So whether that's THC, whether it's CBD. So there is a genetic propensity for different varieties produced, either THC or CBD in higher proportion or to have very low levels in the first place. But then environment comes over the top of that and messes with it. But a variety that has very low numbers, less than 0.1 to start with, isn't going to, if it gets stressed, it's not gonna produce huge amounts. But something that's sitting at 0.5, 0.6 normally will easily go up over the 1%. Yep, no, that makes sense. And the last question that I have here so far are nitrogen requirements to grow. Yep, yep. So we've kind of, the general consensus around the place seems to be just treated as any vigorous, hungry cereal crop or normal crop. So we've been using somewhere around 100 units of in and getting that from wherever. So we have, in some years we've actually been successful in growing legumes through the winter and getting good nitrogen levels in the soil. The soil down at my op is quite fertile anyway. So we don't put a lot of nitrogen or other nutrients on down there. It's pretty poor up here. So we've tried growing legumes to add some nitrogen but we still had to add a bit more in fertilizer. We haven't had any issues of obvious nutrient deficiency at those sorts of levels. So that seems to be about right but there hasn't been, there hasn't been detailed work done on nutrition. Not in Australia, I should say. Yep. Now I've got here what is happening to the herd? Is it viable for construction? So herd is used in hempcrete. So yes, it's viable. And there are people who will tell you they'll take as much as you can produce. I've yet to hear them give a price that they're willing to pay for all of this herd. And the cost of separating that from the fibre and getting it to Western Australia, which is where the particular gentleman was who was making this offer, are pretty steep. So he'd want to be paying a lot of money and I don't expect he is. So the herd does have a number of uses and it is a product in its own right but probably the lower value product of the herd and fibre combination. So generally speaking, what I didn't mention in my presentation is that if you're wanting to grow top quality fibre and therefore maximise your return on fibre, you harvest at flowering. So you're not going to get a seed crop. If you get a seed crop then the fibre you have left over then is of lower quality and therefore lower value. So the herd is then a byproduct from that extraction process but it does have a value. It's not a waste product. It is a secondary product. Yep. Annalysis of another one I've got here. What is the minimum height for a fibre plant crop? Ooh, good question. I don't know. But I guess the general principle is plant them close together, make them grow vertically very quickly because the longer the individual fibres are, the more valuable they are. And so a crop that grows to three, four, five metres high with no branching will have fibres that run the full length of that plant and those fibres are valuable. So the taller the better I think would be the answer. But I don't know. Five metres is about the maximum of what I've heard of. But I don't really know how tall they can grow. And they need to, you're gonna need them to be very closely planted at that one to stop them side branching, but also that they hold each other up because really they're not very strong when they're that tall and that skinny. So they do need to be planted very densely. So actually they compete with each other and push themselves for skyward but they also support each other in that. What's sort of the maximum you've grown at some of your trial sites, Mark? So those numbers I showed from the first year are the tallest we've had, so over three metres. Why is the soil condition after a crop and is it a good rotation crop? Yes, it is. It does actually, it has very strong root system and puts roots down through the soil. So for our sandy redland soils, it's really good for getting some organic matter into the soil. It's used in some other places for remediation of soil so it'll push roots through and open up soil. It's not putting nitrogen into the soil. It's not a legume, so that's not one of the benefits. It's a good rotation crop except that you need to be careful because sclerotinia is one of the diseases or pest issues that it has. So legumes are a bit of an issue coming straight before or straight after a hemp crop and you can get it, get carried over. If you get carried over from one of those crops into hemp or from hemp into one of those crops, it will increase the prevalence and damage from that issue. So yeah, it is a good rotation crop but it needs to just be managed to be in relation to other crops. What about a companion crop? I guess it's possible but I guess the question is if you're going to manage it as a broadacre crop and if you're doing a minimum of a hectare, then it's not something you're gonna harvest by hand. So if you're doing it commercially, if you're doing it on a broadacre scale, even if it's irrigated, then you probably really don't wanna have another crop in there with it. It's just gonna cause issues with harvest and management but certainly it's possible. I've heard of people growing it down the mid-rows between fruit trees just to give it a go and see how it worked. I think that was sort of the idea that was Banty doing it. So yeah. Right, so it is possible but you're gonna need to be able to get equipment down the tree rows to harvest or to sow it and to harvest it and that could be a bit restrictive between fruit trees because you don't wanna be damaging your fruit trees every time you've got to harvest your hemp. Exactly. And also then, and also the irrigation, low level sprinklers aren't gonna really work once the hemp gets going because it'll get up, it'll get quite thick. And so you'll need your sprinklers above the hemp canopy which may not work so well with your fruit trees unless you're running them on overhead sprinklers already. So other than the wee competition issues with insects and fungal infections or nematodes. So we've had a few little issues. We've had nothing that's wiped our crop out but we have had heliothus bugs or sorry, caterpillars. We've had some bugs that were coming in and chewing on the seed but they were coming in from outside. They weren't breeding in the crop. So there wasn't much we could really do about them. We did have some fungus. Not really sure what it was, gray mold or butritus or something in the southeast one year when it was quite wet and warm for a while. But when conditions dried out and the crop grew at the top of the crop grew away it actually just all died away naturally because those lower leaves get shaded out and then die and fall to the ground as the crop grows. And so what we thought was gonna be a problem and the grower who manages that site was talking to his agronomist about what they might be able to spray and before they ever got around to doing anything the problem kind of went away. So that's promising. And you know, under our normal summer conditions you don't normally get too long a period where it's humid and warm. Usually it dries out and that's gonna control those sorts of issues. So yeah, some minor issues, minor problems. Probably the biggest issue we've had in those three years was last year with our last variety that we harvested here at Loxton. We hadn't had any problems up until then and then I came out one day and the birds were all in there. The parrots were in chewing the seed out of the heads. Oh wow. And I said, we need to harvest now. I was actually wondering that when you said you do a shallow seed if birds would then come along and pick the seed direct out of the ground. So we haven't noticed that as a problem. So yeah, I guess it's only there fairly briefly. I guess if the birds learnt that that was what was happening, they might come. But no, we haven't seen that as a problem. The last couple of questions I've got here, Mark, sort of to do with regulations and legislation. First question is Tasmanian growers that were growing hemp for seed. We're having problems with trying to get second use from stalks such as mulch used to regulations. Is that the same in SA? And then also regulations in regards to volunteer plants the following year. Yeah. I don't know the answer to either of those questions categorically. I suggest that you talk to the licensing people on that on the PERSA webpage that I directed you to before. There are links to the licensing people and are very helpful, happy to talk to you about all those sorts of issues. So I don't know what the options are for reusing the leftover crop material. I do know that when we first started looking at this, we went and visited a grower down towards Geelong in Victoria and he was growing for seed, harvesting the seed and then he was burning the trash because he didn't have any economic outlet for it. He wasn't able to feed it to his sheep under Victorian license legislation. I'm not sure about that in South Australia. I don't think you can, but I wouldn't want to be quoted. So you want to ask that question of the licensing people. But yeah, they're having an economical, second product path for that material has been one of the problems for the industry after growing a seed crop because the quality of the fiber certainly and quite likely the herd as well is somewhat compromised by that stage of the plant's life. So yeah, sorry, I'll probably have an answer to the question. No, I think you have. It's just you refer to the right part of the agent that might be able to help out with these questions. I think our last question of the night because we're getting close to 7.30 and it's been a really good interaction with these questions. Why do you think herd isn't commercially available in SA? Commercially available. A viable, sorry, I'm just saying that's viable. Right, because of the cost of the machinery to actually separate the fiber and the herd and to produce that product. So if somebody made the investment to set up a processing plant, it could become commercially viable, but that person could also go bust in a big way if they didn't get enough growers wanting to grow for that market. So it is a big risk for someone to jump into that and invest a lot of money. And at this stage, nobody's taken that leap. What the chances are, how long it's likely before someone would do that, I don't know. But until that happens, there's really, the economics of, pardon me, the economics of growing it here and shipping it to, I think it's somewhere near Hamilton, in Victoria that there is a plant. They just don't stack up. The money you're gonna get for the fiber and herd just isn't enough to cover the cost of transport. We just have one last question to sneak in there, Mark. You've obviously got the trial sites happening at Lockston and down the Southeast. Are there any opportunities to expand those trial sites and in particular, maybe doing a trial in the Adelaide Hills? I don't think that's likely at the moment. I can certainly, you know, raise that with Sardy, but, you know, at the moment, there's, so at the moment, there is a bit going on nationally, looking at potential trials around the country. But the money available for this sort of work is quite limited because the industry is actually pretty undeveloped and fragmented. So there's not a lot of money available and the number of trial sites that are possible even under a national program are very limited. And it would be one trial site in South Australia if we were involved in that program. So, given where the industry currently is developing, that would likely be in the Southeast. So, yeah, it's really, from our point of view, it's a matter of the economics of setting up a trial site and where the money comes from to do that. The state government has been funding this to date, but their resources, our resources are limited as well. So, yeah, I don't know that the chance, there's opportunity for anyone to get a license and to start doing some trial work of their own, but that's, you know, again, there's a reasonable investment in a license as well. And so, I guess, most licensees are hoping to make some money fairly quickly to cover the cost of the license and their production costs rather than just do years of trials. So, yeah. It's probably a good leading actually for me to close this session in the sense that I do know that there's a pretty keen group in the hills that would, I would expect to see, explore this opportunity a little bit further. So, I think if anyone is interested in this, John, I'm pretty sure you won't mind me saying that you're probably the go-to person there and potentially, you know, there's funding in terms of recovery and, yeah, those types of opportunities because of the bushfire response. So, I think tonight was about, you know, here's the basics, here's potentially what the opportunity is, but if you feel that you would like to perhaps be part of something beyond tonight, John is probably the best person to go to. John, I didn't want to put your contacts up on the screen. So, if you are viewing this webinar externally, happy for you to jot down my contact details. And if you wanted to contact me, I'm then happy to put you in contact with John. And also, they're just reiterating the PERSA website. There's lots of really good information there as a follow-up as this webinar. And as I said before, this webinar is being recorded and will be available on the PERSA website. And I think Miranda also has plans to share it through the Cudley Creek Recovery Facebook page. So, Mark, I'd really like to thank you for sharing your insights and your expertise. I'd also like to thank everyone who's joined us for tonight's webinar. And, yeah, as I said before, on the screen there, we've got contact information and the opportunity for further information. So, I'd like to thank you for your time tonight and have a wonderful evening. Thanks, everybody.