 I think we will go ahead and get started. My name is Dave Ripplinger. I'm an economic specialist with NDSU Extension. I work primarily in bioproducts and bioenergy, which hemp is at times a part and also a food crop as well. Today we have Rime Detail from NDSU Extension and Ben Brimlow from in-hemp, as well as myself to talk a little bit about producing and marketing hemp grain this year. Just a little bit of background so you know what we're going to do is we're going to work through our slide deck and during that time you're welcome to ask any questions you want to using the Q&A feature. But for the most part we're going to save everything for the end and keep everybody's microphone and camera off so we can get full attention to the speaker. So with that I'm going to hand it over to Ben within hemp. Right well good afternoon everybody it's good to see the participation we've got here today. The focus on today is of course grain hemp production specifically but before we jump into that I want to give a little background on hemp. A lot of you have heard about hemp in the news probably the biggest one is CBD hemp. I have up here though three forms of hemp that are grown today. The first CBD fiber and then seeds and grains so CBD is that nutraceutical crop. It's grown for biomass for flowers where it's taken either cold pressed or using alcohol some kind of solvent based extraction to remove that nutraceutical health compound. It's as far as farming goes it's pretty intensive both financially it's high input cost as well as inputs with labor as well. The second is fiber it hasn't really taken off yet in the United States but it's very big in Asian countries and Europe. It's grown for obviously the stocks where you get the herd herd and vast fibers for making textiles wrote things like that. Production wise it fits more of a hay operation where you'd be be grown that you know with seed and with the drill and coming back to the swath or bailing and off processing. And then lastly what we're talking about today is seeds or grain production. Obviously it's grown for the seeds for the grain plant habit is short vertical growth, not unlike your grain crops wheat barley etc inputs and production practices are very similar to your your cereal grains and oil seeds. And out of these three I believe hemp has the most established market and is going to be increasing in demand. That'll pass off to. So as far as visual goes will CBD looks like, like I say a horticultural crop or a high, high value vegetable crop it requires a lot of manual labor planting. This is what a fiber stand would typically look like that crop can get up above 10 feet tall. It's, it's then processed to remove that inner core from the best best fibers produce insulation. So it looks like that. Next. And this is what a grain crop with it we look like. You can see it with your, your disc drill your, your whole type drill no till conventional. 9800 days you got a got a grain crop coming out of your combine and into your bins. And I'll pass it on to Ryan now we'll talk about some NDSU. Yeah, so thanks Ben. I'm Ryan Bido extension cropping system specialists out here at the Dickinson Research Extension Center in Southwest North Dakota. So recently I worked with Leslie Lubinow and Burton Johnson to put together a short publication, talking about green production in North Dakota we kind of cover all aspects of production from what we know so far. Burton Johnson really helped start a lot of this he's kind of the leader of the head program here in North Dakota help help kind of get things going off the ground back in 2015. If I remember correctly, he's been pushing for it longer than that. So if you go to the next slide we'll kind of start talking about planting conditions a little bit looks like the words that I had we're in white text when we switched the backgrounds but that's okay. So, what we really want to have is about 12 plants per square foot. Alright, that's our optimum plant population. The problem is, your germination is very, very low compared to other crops that we typically grow you got to think about, you know, these breeding programs aren't as advanced as, let's say, corn, for example, right so you're going to have just not that bigger coming out of that seed you're not going to have that seed quality for germination. You can get pretty good germination, especially with some of these, you know, good seed sources, but you got to make sure that you do a germination test. And even if you do have that good germination. A lot of our research and experience is showing that you want to have an extra 25 to 30% you know plants put out there seeds put down to adjust for seedling mortality. And one way to do a germination test is to make a rag doll so that's taking a paper towel, counting out a certain number of seeds and then you look at your percentage that germinate over a certain period of time. I think one way to kind of help adjust for any of that early bigger is maybe try doing that germination tests in some soil, so you can kind of see how that seed reacts to your environment. I like that cold soil so you want to be planting a little bit later. If you plant too early, you might get too much biomass, because this is daylight sensitive when it switches to seed right so you don't want to have too much of that energy going into that biomass growth. And I would try to plant this in a timeline similar to soybeans for your region. So avoid any frost. It's going to cause some damage. We do have some volunteer hemp that we just sprayed the other day that did come up with this nicer warmer weather. And also you got to be careful for your herbicide selections right but by having that later mid mid to late May planting day, you can adjust for taking care of your weeds with the pre herbicide application, and also kind of get your optimum growth in your garden. If you see on the top right there, they found May 22 had the best grain yield as well as that best stand density. So if you go to the next slide. So here in Dickinson, we had lower stands. Our best yielding variety was Canada, little under 900 pounds per acre. Go to the next slide. Here we're comparing on the left, we have the Dickinson variety trial from last year. On the right is Langdon variety trial from last year. So you see those plant stands. In Langdon they got nearly twice what we've had they've been growing hemp a few more years. Last year was our first large scale trial here in Dickinson. In 2018 we had a demonstration that kind of helped us figure out a few things planting and harvest wise. We did have lower stands and with that resulted much lower yields. So that stand is very important. So make sure that when you are planting hemp that you're putting adjusting for germination as well as that seedling mortality. We go one more slide next. So all the information that you can find in DSU variety trial research, you can find at this link in the top left here. And this will show the latest research. The next slide. This is our extension crops page. So this will have any of the latest extension as well as research material that you can find on him. You can see our webinar here today. One last thing I want to kind of talk about before I pass it back over to Ben. Go to the next slide. So down in Headinger, John Richardson took this picture here. So they had an awesome stand. Their crop looked really great. And then I'll touch on this a little bit later on, but birds can really wreak havoc on on hemp. So you have those great stands. And really half of yield of what we had and most of that went to the birds. Right. So you really have to be careful with that harvest timing. Because those birds will eat a lot of that crop. Right. So next slide. So you have any questions. Feel free to contact me. Also be sure to follow if you're on Instagram. The top one there is the REC Agronomy. That's my work account. If you want to see a bunch of pictures of my dog as well as some plant science stuff, you can follow my personal account there too. So then go back to you. Alrighty. Thank you, Ryan. So I'm going to jump a little bit into the Agronomy side. Pretty. We're giving a 3000 view, you know, foot view here, but it's at least to get started for those of you interested in raising grain hemp. To start off with, I didn't introduce myself too well, but I'm the agronomist for IMD hemp out of Fort Benton, Montana. And we're looking for growers for 2019. So if some of this looks like it'll fit your operation. We've got 8000 acres already contracted but looking for more and ready to help growers cross the border in North Dakota. So, anyways, so to start off with, we got to look into field selection. You can't just put hemp anywhere. You can't just throw seeds out there and let it be and it'll take off and be profitable. Like any other crop, you got to start with a good foundation. Hemp does great under good nutrition. Alrighty. So first of all, location selection. We want to avoid high clay soils with poor drainage. Your sandy loam or silt loam soils are perfect for hemp. If you got sandy soils, it'd be best to have some kind of irrigation ability there. But hemp will grow in, you know, precipitation zones all the way down to 12 inches. Crop rotation. Avoid following other oil seeds. When you raise hemp as a seed, it's more similar to oil seeds and can actually pick up some of the same diseases as your canola mustard, etc. Something to be aware of is chemical residue. So if you're following wheat, you're usually okay. If you're following peas or garbs or soybeans. If you're using anything like Spartan charge that has high soil residual. You got to watch those plant back dates and I'm ready. I'm willing and ready to help any questions arise on on those chemical residues. Most guys are putting it behind their wheat or their barley, or behind summer fallow if you're in the dry areas. Fertilizer, of course, that's something we all are interested in. You don't want to put too much on, but also we don't want to put not enough. You know, we're still dialing it in for North Dakota Montana growers, but for now the best rule of thumb is a one to 10 ratio so for every, I should say for every 10 pounds of seed, you want to put one pound of nitrogen or one unit of nitrogen. So if you're looking at 1000 or 1500 pound grain projection. You want to make sure you got 150 total units of nitrogen in the soil between your organic matter, so nitrate and applied nitrogen. Phosphorus levels are usually in the 30 to 40 pounds per per per acre. So for 15 to 20 and it's important to keep an eye on your zinc and boron levels boron you might not see a yield bump. If you add more a pound or so but zinc like in the other crop is is pretty important. Next. All right, so you've got your fertilizer plan you got your field picked out now we're getting ready for seeding. You want to know when to plant right you don't want to plant too early or you'll you'll get zapped by the frost, you don't want to plant too late or you get caught and might run out of moisture if you're dry land especially difficult planting dates for North Dakota Montana is going to be mid main to mid June I I pull that back a little to early June, but most of our guys in Montana growing with us this year are going to be planting here in a couple weeks. We want to make sure there's enough moisture to get germinated now the ground. You want to make sure that soil temperature is 48 degrees Fahrenheit at your two inch level. And just be aware with planting day the earlier you see you're going to get a taller stand. In general, the later you see it is going to be a little shorter. So if you're concerned about having too high a crop, you can just plant a little later. Seeding rate in depth, like Ryan had already mentioned we're looking at 10 to 12 plants per square foot. And you want to get those seeds around a half inch. If you've got a got a drill that keeps putting seed too deep or very variable it's, you want to tune that up a bit. So half inch target. Don't go anywhere deeper than an inch deep. If you're planting you can it can handle quite a wide variety some guys will seed with with corn drills but if you're a grain farmer. Just put that seed right how you in the in the in the drill use for your wheat your canola. If you're six inch spacing or 10 inch spacing. All of those are are good options. And I would be air on the side of having narrower spacing because that'll help without competing weeds. Regarding equipment conventional grain drills are going to work whole type disc openers, maybe just fine. Just make sure you can get some consistency placement. If you run an air seed or turn the wind speed down so you don't end up with cracking. That could significantly limit your emergence if, if, if your wind speeds are too high. All right, next, already. In season management, the best, you know, for the growers that have worked with us in the past. Those of them have not gone back into their field until harvest time. So they see that may June and come back in September for harvest. Ryan did mention bird pass being an issue, which I think. Yes, it would be an issue on a trial scale. When you get to industrial commercial scale field production. I don't expect that to be as much of an issue. Disease and insects have not been an issue in Montana just because we got more dry environment. There's a possibility of seeing some gray mold show up in your higher moisture, higher humidity environments. In that case, there are some decent organic products that'll work. We currently do not have any conventional insecticide or fungicides labeled for him. Regarding environment. We can see significant damage from hail and wind. If you're in the late later in the season, August, September, you hit by hail. But at the same time, we can have pretty bad hail storm early in the season, June. Let's see July. Some of our growers got hit pretty hard. This past year. And since it was before flowering will be for budding. That plant completely got stripped down leaves completely obliterated, but that crop came back and yielded beautifully. I actually got 100 and see 940 pounds off of that field, even with a near complete destruction from hail came back pretty well. If you're irrigating if you're growing hemp on irrigation, we really got to watch out for over watering. Once that those roots become waterlogged and can't breathe. It can hurt the field pretty good. So be aware of over watering. Give enough water to get it started and then come back and flowering and put some more on other than that, I would not put I would air on the side of less water than too much. Alrighty, harvest is where the rubber meets the road. Anybody can grow a crop seed hemp, get a beautiful stand up and grow on harvest is where it gets a little trickier timing is pretty important. Of course, nobody's very few grain farmers are going to air on the side of harvesting too early. You know, if you're a wheat farmer you wait till that that weeds completely golden and crisp and so that threshes out and just shatters out the back the with hemp though. We want to target actually intermediate stage between, you know, kind of that early and late stage, you want to cut it when those stems are still green heads are starting to dry out. If you look at the seeds in the head we're looking at 70 to 80% maturity. The grain moisture would be anywhere from 10 to 20%. Targeting this mid, you know, this intermediate maturity. We're going to see less wrapping less fiber catching on the on the bearings on the on this any spinning shafts. It just moves a lot better through the combine. If you cut late, you can still get decent yields. In fact, get all the yield you would have gotten before it's just much more difficult. And yet to be much more careful with your combine. You're going to have to keep your head as high as possible limit the amount of biomass going through that combine. Otherwise, you can see that fiber just catching on on a lot of a lot of pieces in that combine so some to be considered of when a plant little or I'm sorry harvest a little earlier than you would naturally want to next. So some other considerations for harvest is when you're growing grain hemp it's actually a raw product from the field, literally to the consumer. There's no kill step, even though, you know, for 20 years, they've been farming like this we're, we're looking into options to add one just to add some food safety there but it's important to have clean, clean combines trucks augers bins. You don't want a lot of a lot of bird crap in the in the bins or the machinery. So hemp is a gluten free product naturally and it, and it's marketed as gluten free as well so getting, getting rid of as much grain and the bins or augers is important. Of course start with a sharp cutter bar because hemp, as you know hemp fiber is the strongest fiber on earth and and can really cause some issues if your your cutter bars dole. There will be some minor modifications of the combine covering shafts bearings, all the drag chain to limit fire risk. Another important thing is to disable your straw chopper. If it's green some guys, if it's on the greener side some guys are able to put hemp through their straw chopper but I'd, I advise against doing that. Having water and fire seems to be on hand is always important, like you would with any other, any other crop. So something is really important for for drain hemp is storage. You can't just throw it in a bin and let it go. You will need bins with air. You don't need heat necessarily but you do need aeration. In the West, I'd say further East you might have to put heat on it but North Dakota, Montana is generally lower humidity so I wouldn't worry about getting heat on but air is important. It's critical. You want to get that grain out of the field and on air in a bin within four hours. You want it to sit overnight in a truck without air. If you run it if you got comb, comb bottom bins, you want to flip it after two weeks just to make sure all of that is getting dried down. If you got full floor aeration butler bin or such you'll just run run air and till it hits 10% moisture and and you're good to go. So just send that grain into the processor to ind hamper and the other processor you want to run that seed through cleaner, if you can. That way you'll you'll limit any kind of pathogens that might come in with the seed, as well as reduce the reduce the trash and and dockage that you don't want to deal with on the processor and next. Okay, so I'm just going to share a little checklist here. If you want to grow with ID him. This is kind of what I go through with a grower. First of all, do you got decent soil or you can you grow a good crop of hemp of wheat, can you go good crop of canola. You can do good crop of him. So pH you want to get between five and eight. I'd most, you know, you want to shoot for six but we got guys out. Eastern Washington growing it on on mid fives. You want a minimum of 12 inches of rainfall need a grain drill with accurate seed placement. So conventional rotary or cylinder based, you know, combine will do the job and on farm grain storage with air is critical. Lastly, do your own research as well. This website here is hemp trade dot CA has an excellent guide it's very thorough, and I can't get into the nitty gritty details in a 10 minute seminar but spend some time on that website. It is really good, really covers a lot of information. In fact, even as a combine settings and such. If you want to get a hold of me my email address is been at nd hemp calm, pretty simple or come to our website nd hemp calm, we're looking for acres will love to love to have some production with you. And with that, I'll pass it off to David. Great. Thanks, Ben. I'm going to talk a little bit about production economics and marketing. Probably one of the best things to understand is that we're learning every year and kind of using the phrase that Ben did you know we're trying to dial things in a bit. We are fortunate I mean we have had commercial production in Canada you know just across the border for 20 years. We're looking at it to that that local that locally fine tuned production it's going to take a little bit of time. A lot of our counterparts at other land grant universities other extension services and other states you know we've been working on this and we're we're getting better. But again it's it's learning and working with farmers and with with private industry each year trying to ratchet things up a bit. Talk a little bit about crop budgets for the producers I'm sure you're familiar with these nds extension and like many other states puts out crop budgets for a number of different crops going in the state one of the things that makes him different from the other crops you have We don't have that historical information a lot of what goes into updating a crop budget from year to year is actually looking at the historical data from the year previous. In terms of how the farmers actually grow the crop we don't have data that that's that fine tuned so we can use that to inform our budgets. At the same time it doesn't necessarily limit its usefulness again because you have to recognize what a budget is and what it's used used for. Again it's really a framework and to give an understanding of costs and benefits but it's not going to give you the precision. And in some cases not even the accuracy for your specific operation. And again to if you think about just the state of North Dakota as large as it is the experiences of hemp grower in Langdon versus Dickinson is going to be fundamentally different. And of course right now to there are different production practices including in terms of tillage and equipment of how you're going to do this. And again we just don't quite have the the breadth of information we want to really hone things in. One of the things we always get add to when we're talking about budgets first of all to understand what they are which is to give an understanding of where things are. But also to understand the risks and so within within any within crop production and there's really two big parts one is you have yield risk. You know I can't say with certainty what your yield is going to be. Ben and Ryan both shared some some information some knowledge on how do you do things a certain way to increase the expectation or what you're expected yield might be. But again there's always yield risk with weather and pests and everything else. But you need to need to be ready for those market price maybe a source of risk if you haven't contracted your crop. Although many hemp grain producers do contract summer all of their production each year for the last few years as it's been available. And the one thing I add to with this with this budget idea is that when you get a crop budget if there are certain places where you know the numbers is to put your own numbers in. Again the budgets that we share be it the traditional crop budgets or the crop budget I'm going to show you just a second. You know they're for average operations for a really for a farmer that doesn't exist and almost certainly isn't you. So if you do have those numbers to go ahead and make use of them. The other thing that goes along with it too in terms of dealing with risk is to go in there and fiddle with the numbers of it. To identify where thresholds might be for a crop to become unprofitable or for certain costs to get a little bit bigger than you might want to go just so you kind of see where the bounds are. So in this slide is a draft budget. It's based on the budget that we shared last year updated a bit with some more recent numbers guided. This is actually structured like University of Nebraska crop budget because they show you a little bit more of the insights in terms of how the numbers are calculated than our own budgets at NDSU. A lot of the information from this I don't have it on here but I have it on the budget itself. A lot of the knowledge is coming from the Canadian side of the border in terms of fertility management that type of thing. But I'd also go back to this as we're learning and I know Ben mentioned it and previously Ryan mentioned in other conversations of high yielding wheat is a pretty good standard or idea to kind of get an idea of what you want to do for your fertility. And again there's going to be some variability on this. There are an ever increasing number of agronomists and farmers who have experience with this. I was actually surprised last year in Carrington. We had a field day for hemp and there were at least I would say at least if you know a dozen folks in the in the in the real in the in the room or excuse me out there in the field who had experienced who had or were growing the crop, which is, you know, really helpful and again to talk to folks like Ben or Ryan and we have Brian Hansen up at Langton who have this experience can kind of help us learn a little bit more. Again within all of this you know you can have your own expectations in turn of yield your own labor costs and the like. And it kind of gets down to you know what are you expecting in terms of cost per acre. You know cost per in this case pound of seed and then what your returns might be and really what we're kind of looking at here is you know costs and all in cost of about 25 cents a pound. And a strictly cash cost that is if you already own your land and your machinery, or don't consider it specifically of about 20 cents a pound, turning that into you know what the market is at today. And what I've heard consistently for over the last 12 months is 50 cents for conventional $1 for organic, obviously that the devil's in the details and getting, you know, having a conversation with with someone who's either contracting for future delivery forward contracting for delivery this fall, or to kind of get a feel for what's going to go on in the spot market. And that kind of is a segue for marketing hemp grain. Last year Frank Olson and myself released a quick press release just to give everybody a heads up and really just more of a reminder to take some precautions when getting into a new specialty crop. For a lot of the producers in North Dakota, you know, Northwest Minnesota, Montana, you know growing specialty crops is something we become very familiar with and growing new specialty crops is something we're really familiar with. The same precautions apply and it doesn't hurt to go through them again. And probably first and foremost is to do your market research again to know, you know, who you might be selling to what the prices might look like. If you're going to contract, you know who the buyers might be and what they might look like. I'll actually jump down to the fourth point. One piece of that too is is counterparty risk. If a buyer be able to pay, you know, what if they aren't able to pay, is there a secondary market, much less concerned about this on the grain side than I am on the CBD side. The CBD industry, you know, which is again is distinct and I'm glad we spent a little bit of time differentiating between the different types of hemp. You know, we already saw a boom and a bust in the industry in a little over a year, and some growers were not able to market their crop including some who had a contract to sell to a buyer. I don't think that's, you know, anywhere near the risk in hemp grain that it is in CBD, but again, it do need to do your due diligence. Some of the things we touched on just a little bit is quality specifications. You know, this is a food crop, you know, you're going right in and so you need to be sure and take care to meet those standards. You can definitely be discounted heavily or you might have a rejected load if you don't meet those standards. The one thing I would say if folks become overly concerned is that we do have producers, especially North Dakota and even more so across the border in Manitoba who have grown this crop and been able to meet those specs, you know, for quite some time. Another note too just in general about specialty crop contracting is to know what you're actually contracting for. Is it all the production from an acre? Is it so much and then everything extra? There's an option to buy and so forth. It does become a bit important, especially for those cases if you're contracting for a specific amount of production and you come up short. In a new crop like hemp grain, you know, would you be able to go and find that type of supply? And most contracts now, you know, don't necessarily include language like that, but you do need to take note to see if it does and how you might manage that if you went that way. And then finally too, the traditional ideas of force majeure, you know, what would, you know, what might happen that would make the contract null, you know, what type of conditions might be there. Again, no different than any other specialty crop or a lot of other contracted production, but just good knowledge. And one of the things that is different within hemp is the regulatory issues as it is cannabis. For the most part, this is all straightforward and I can't speak too much about Montana. You know, you do need a license to grow the crop. You do have certain reporting requirements as you grow the crop when you're going to harvest the crop. In the state of North Dakota, you don't have to track and I'm not going to say this right. You know, the sale of the seed, you know, isn't a licensed event. And so you can, you can, you can, you can move the grain within the supply chain. One of the best practices it's kind of recommended is just have, you know, your license number have that type of documentation as you move the material. You know, even within state, but especially interstate or if you're going to, you know, sell it internationally just to have that information available. So that's really what I had. I'm going to make a quick plug for an event next Thursday at one o'clock. We're going to have a little round table discussion for the hemp industry. I'm actually going to send out a blast everybody registered for this event. So you have this information. I was going to talk about challenges and opportunities in the industry and ways we might go forward. I'll also share a link to that on the hemp, the NDSU crops hemp page. So the same place where you would have registered for this so you can access it there as well. Now that we've kind of moved through the presentation part, we're open for Q&A. You know, please, if you can use the Q&A tool that we have. Right now we only have one question, which we can answer pretty quickly, but if you have any others, please use that tool. They're easiest to manage that way. We'll also look in chat, which some of you have, you know, have used and might be more comfortable using. And then finally to a recording of this webinar will be put on that same hemp website, as well as all that additional information, including the resource that Ryan and Leslie produced. So you can look at it at a future date. Just jumping quick into the question that we have right here is will the slides be available to view later? Sure. I'll speak for all three of us and we'll go through and make sure that it's that it's got what we want to contain and we'll get those on this, the same, the same web page with the recording so you'll be able to access the PowerPoint there as well. And then over to the questions here. There's a couple coming through on chat. So, Harold has a question about what specific organic products. And so I think that might be just looting to I mean, there is a market for organic material, organic hemp material, process material, and there's clearly a premium for that. And there's a lot of interest. A significant premium if you have organic fields and are interested in producing a crop, you get a dollar a pound and have a decent crop. It will be a fantastic crop and something you might, you know, definitely that might be the crop you brag about next winter or maybe for a few years or decades. In terms of the Roundtable, the Roundtable is online. It'll be actually be over a Zoom webinar just like this. We at NDSU were still an extension. We're still not allowed to meet face to face and that's probably going to last for at least a little bit. And we hope that that helps to kind of meet the needs of what we're trying to achieve again, which is to kind of build this industry. Great question from Sheldon Thomas, a co-op model for tribal programs to follow. That's a great question. So we haven't, you know, talking on the organizational side, we haven't really specifically addressed hemp in that. But we could. Between myself and Frank Olson, who's the director of the Center for Cooperatives, you know, I think we'd be happy to have that conversation to see, you know, how can you have this cooperative organization be involved in hemp? You know, on the production input side, the collection storage marketing side, it's certainly a possibility. I don't think that there would necessarily be too much that would be unique from a tribal standpoint, at least not evident to me right away, Sheldon, but you know, it's something we could look at. And I do know that, you know, Turtle Mountain, other reservations are really interested in hemp and, you know, have really been aggressive in moving forward. And so, you know, extension's happy to help and you're in North Dakota, so we can definitely talk a little bit more offline. We do have a note regarding a quest for a copy of the webinar and we can do that. And are there any other questions? Well, I'm seeing some questions here. We've got questions on that organic materials for controlling weeds or insects. With weed control, there are, I mean, the best weed control is going to be planting timing. If you've got bad weeds, I'd push off your planting. But a couple of flushes get up with some rains. That's a nice thing about hemp is why it does fit the organic production model so well is that later seeding. You usually get a few good flushes of weeds up. But for materials, I mean, there's still even organic herbicides, believe it or not, they're just an acid, essentially periquate that's not as toxic to humans, but it's just an acid based off of vinegar based acid that just burns weeds. But for organic weed control, timing is most important. For insects, you will see insects in the crop. That's for sure. You'll see all sorts of insects. They love it. In fact, even honey bees love hemp. This last year in Southeast Washington, Walla Walla, we were growing some hemp and it was chock full of bees and there wasn't hives for miles around. So as far as controlling insect pests though, usually it won't reach a critical threshold to where you need to spray them out. But if you do get a bad outbreak of, you know, some insect pests, there are organic pyrethroids available, which you should shy away from. But there is also neem based products. So neem oil, and I can go into specific products that you can use for controlling insects and disease, specific insects and disease if you want to reach out to me. And then DSU is doing some research on herbicides. So I'm guessing that that will be used down the road for approval. But yeah, like Ben said, those cultural, biological different practices. I mean, if by having a tighter row spacing, you can kind of help out compete the weeds. But if you do have humidity, high humidity in your area and you're concerned about white mold, having some type of aeration. So I think that with wider row spacing might be a good way to go if that's a concern. One of the next questions is, are we still not able to feed hemp to cattle and it's not listed as a feed, no part of the plant currently is. There's a process that you need to go through. You can feed it in on the Canadian side of the border, not in the United States. It's a pretty organized effort to address this issue. And that could be feeding the biomass material or the grain itself or the leftover cake after, you know, if you're going to crush the oil seed. So right now it's not an accepted feed material. And so that's again, a little bit of research that has to be done and education and in a process that at the federal level, especially to kind of convince those regulators that it's worthwhile. And also in general, it's state departments of egg who have the ultimate call on on feed. And you know right now at this time, even though there's evidence from Europe and practice in Canada that it's fine. We have to work on that at least for a little bit. And here in Dickinson and at the Heading and Research Center this year, we're planning to put hemp in with the cover crop mix to kind of see how it competes with those other crops, compared to a monoculture of hemp. And we will be taking samples to look at nutritional value that kind of stuff too. We won't be feeding it. So that's a question a minimum number of acres needed for for a commercial crop and I just I'd assume this is for a contract. I don't know, Ben if you guys have a minimum number. So we are minimum is 60 acres for a contract that's roughly a truck load of grain so that we can most efficiently transport that grain back to for Ben pressing. And that's what we prefer, but that's 60s are minimum any. Thanks. A next question what did I mention the center cooperatives yes I did. And one of the things I do when I work with new crops is there's a lot of advantages to the cooperative model in organizing supply and doing some some things with newer crops. You know, I've worked with Frank Olson a bit on some of these projects I've worked on a number of projects were sometimes a cooperative model of some type makes sense. And another in another cases it doesn't. You know, in the case of hemp grain right now. You know, I don't you really don't have the chicken and the egg problem which is one way that co ops work really well where you have an obligated. So farmers might own the plant and would be obligated to deliver for a new crop. Here there is a market for for hemp grain and there's a market for the materials that are made from it. And so you don't have to you don't have to manage that like you would with some other new crops. And when, and again we're in my experience that cooperative model works really well. And I don't know if either you guys want to handle the question about Sondland as a, as an allowed herbicide. You know, Brian we've we've looked into that. I haven't filed an application for an emergency exemption on Sondland. But that's something that's something to consider there's been talk about it I haven't begun that application myself but I'm sure if we got enough signatures on it and we could be able to be able to push it through and I haven't tried it yet. So I guess maybe for you Ben discounts for microtoxins I mean, there are, I mean, and then the specifics are in the contract. Yeah, yeah, specifics are in the contract if you're looking for that. And yeah we are keeping track of pathogens such as E. coli listeria. Generally, on that side of things. When you clean your seed and dry it down you're not going to run into any issues. Those pathogens tend to stick into the flower material the chaff, the residue, and those seeds with the clean shell carry very little risk for for pathogens on them. Yeah, and then another question for you Ben you contract certain varieties. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad you asked that because that's, that's kind of our, our, the hat, you know, the thing I'm happiest about is we got. We've got distribution rights for x 59, which is actually one of the most, the most popular varieties in Canada it's been proven for decades and it has an excellent economic package, excellent quality processing quality is big seed, as well as end of market use people actually ask for this specific variety and the yield if you look back on Ryan's notes there, the yield on x 59 is one of the best, usually tops the chart one or two. So that's a variety we contracted. Yeah, there's another question about a market in North Dakota for fiber, and the answer is not yet. Now there's a lot of work being done in the fiber space again as mentioned I mean it is a, it is a very strong fiber and there's there are commercial uses for it. But we really are missing is that middle piece, the folks who will take it from a farmer and get it into a form that someone further down the supply chain might want. But there's definitely a lot of work going into that and there's, you know, discussion of folks who are are close to ready to contract for it. And then Ben I don't know if you wanted to mention anything about what in hemp is doing that space for Mike if you want to jump in. Go ahead, go ahead Mike. So yeah we're on, I'm Mike Herman I'm also the ind amp we're, as you, you know we have a well see processing facility in Fort Benton, and we are following that with a straw processing operation, we've acquired equipment will be building the plant this summer and fall. That is straw. We will be acquiring straw and our contracts this year will include options to acquire that straw. So as far as markets. It's, we're trying to find an added value or have be able to dual crop our green with our grain growers just add a little additional value. We're working on the development of the downstream markets, but our facility will do primary to court occasion. So we're being having the hamper available for, for further processing and use an animal bedding and the like, and then the bass fiber, again available for what they call non woven products or for further processing into true fiber products. That's another development piece that will take more investment and partnering but yes there will be markets in the region for for the hemp straw in in the next year I would believe and I'm sure there are others that are working on this as well. Chad Alvin of course at NDSU also has been involved in use of the development of products and working in that space so I suggest you follow up and look at some of what he's done as well. Great. Now we have a question about active God clauses in the contract and I don't know then or Mike if you have any specific comments I mean I would assume they're their template boilerplate type type comments. Yes, they're active God clauses if you have a loss due to hail or some other active God we're not going to hold you to to the agreement they're reasonable. Same on our side of our place burns down we may not be able to take the grain but otherwise we're going after it. And one thing I mentioned I glossed over a bit is you know insurance is now available was available in 2020 for the first time as part of as a whole farm policy. The deadline for applying for a policy like that happened has passed it was March 15. But again we've had producers, you know grow this crop without insurance in the past. But that product is available and actually was went through really really quickly. A lot of work was done by the analysts who put the package together, and we'll know more and then the insurance may end up looking even more appealing in the future. As we know more about yields across the country but you know the idea of risk management is is is definitely important, you know be that active God clause insurance or otherwise. As we're kind of working through the, the end of the questions I was wondering if the two other panelists if you guys had any other comments or things you thought of, while we were visiting, which you might want to add. I would add that there are Roger Guseus I think he's here he's with healthy oil seeds he's in Carrington, North Dakota. He's been processing hemp grain for several years and is is available I'm sure and can answer questions for people in the region. I'm not sure if he's still contracting, but he's a friend of ours and I want to shout out to him and there's a question about demand for food grade oil. There's a demand for those oil products. We are just getting to get our products into the market, but there's basically the hemp oil, the hemp parts and the hemp protein products of which the hemp oil and the hemp parts are the are being used more in the human industry. Certainly the hemp protein enriched hemp protein is also used. There are multiple manufacturers that are currently selling primarily Canadian produce products but we look to displace those folks on the shelf at our earliest convenience. I don't know if I have any else to add in that regard. There's a first question about banking. There's also. We do have references we can connect you with our friends at Bank of the West, they're in both Minnesota and North Dakota. They're our banker. They've been Jeff Birch who's there can help orient you there's, they're a large commercial bank that is actively working. They're working groups to help identify and the compliance issues for most lenders. This is a new product and they have to establish internal compliance requirements to be sure that they're verifying when they're lending or working with people working in the now legal hemp space that you are working in hemp and not marijuana. And so it depends on your bank and what their compliance requirements are but there's been good progress on on the banking. And then again I mean we do have a commercial hemp industry. I mean it's fledgling and this is the next year. So there are lenders in the region. Bank of the West is one of those who who are willing to to lend some or not. And that's quite important to note in a lot of conversations I've had where we're lenders you know if that is going to be part of your operation that you're going to have to move your entire operation elsewhere. So I mean it's something that to definitely think about talk about and likely to if you're going to move into something like this is to have that conversation with your lender as it is. And John Mortensen mentioned in our chat here. The MD Department of Ag is currently licensing but the process will be much slower due to COVID-19. So they wish to grow this year they need to get moving on that process. So it looks like Bank of the West won't do CBD but will do feed and fiber. That's correct. See there's question about delivery dates. I assume that means when you deliver your grain. Our process is you know we don't have we're not an elevator so we do not have storage for all of the grain that we contract for so we do call for grain as we as we will run conventional and organic runs as soon as our final organic certification is complete. So we basically call for the grain based on the priority or contracting when you contract with us we go down the list and just go by from former one to 30, however many we have. So for the grain we usually request a sample that be sent from the farm several weeks before we're going to bring it in that sample will be reviewed at the site and we send samples out for third party micro contamination assessment. If this grain comes back within our the parameters in our contract for micros, then we schedule when you when you deliver it. You deliver your grain on the schedule date, and we, we settle within, I think 15 days where we do have a settlement process where we look at for foreign material. It's very important for this crop and we highly encourage our growers to clean the grain before that goes to the bin for drying any. We've definitely seen a direct correlation between the amount of foreign material, basically chaff and other organics in with the grain, and the micro contamination that occurs over the period of storage. So it's very important to not only dry it down but do your best to clean it. You get it in, you know, we're, we're being very lax on our foreign matter this year, you know, we're not docking. If you're getting in under 10%. We do provide a docket report and feedback to our growers as to how what what the condition of their grain was and we're really trying to help that out so it's a little bit more than just a delivery date but it is important to understand and it's a good question. Great. Thanks, Mike. I think we've exhausted all of the questions. I want to thank Ryan and Ben for for serving as panelists today and Mike for some additional knowledge from from the private side of things for everyone who participated to thanks for taking the time. We will post the recording and the slides to the the website on the screen. So you're definitely welcome to go check that out, as well as the all the additional other information that's there already and that might be coming in future weeks. I will make one last quick comment because a Western with the Montana Department of Egg is licensing and they did. Okay, this is good to know Montana Department of Egg has extended their deadline until June 1. So that's, that's good to hear. And so duly noted with that I want to thank everybody for joining us and have a great afternoon. Bye.