 Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Farming Matters, which is a program hosted by the North Central Sare program. And we're here to amplify and share what our grantees have been up to, specifically our Farmer Rancher Grant program grantees. And you all are in for a treat today. Our guest is Sarah Stevens, she's with the Kansas Tempt Consortium. I'll let Sarah take it from here soon. I also want to acknowledge and celebrate Marie Flanagan. Hey Marie. Hello. She is our communication specialist at the Sare program and really just help choreograph and make all of the little logistics happen behind the scenes. Sarah, I'm going to toss it over to you to share a little bit about your project and what Kansas Cyber Hemp variety trials all about and where things have been going on since then for you. I really appreciate the chance to be on the Farming Matters show and talk with you about what we learned and what we tried in the industrial hemp acreage expansion project for fiber and grain in Kansas in 2022. That was my second Sare grant. I also had a partnership grant in 2021. And so this I am the presentation talk just a little bit about sort of the history of hemp and then also that first year's grant research and how it turned into what we've learned and tried in the second year. So if that's all right with everybody, I'll just go ahead and get started. I do think it's important to provide a little background because hemp has had such a troubled past in it. There's, you know, the prohibition of the crop influences a lot of the current status of where it is, how it's been not bred or not genetically modified in a way that impacts harvest and just the viability of the crop in different regions and what we're able to use seeds from different areas of the world right now. And all of these things are unfolding and there's just so much in the hemp space that is not settled yet and it is moving in the right direction. Some things more slowly than others, but it has been illegal to grow industrial hemp. I'm basically since the 30s and in the 2014 Farmville, they established the industrial hemp research program. So the very first thing you could apply for in Kansas was a research license with the Department of Agriculture and I did that in 1920. And during that time I was growing inside for CBD, like most well 95% of the licenses in Kansas at that time were for floral production. And so you had to present a research proposal to get a license and so the first year I studied hydroponic growing versus soil and the second year I studied cloning and then in 2021, I guess before that during those times I was really learning more and more about the industrial side of the crop and what it really would look like to grow on acreage sections and how different that is from growing for CBD in a mostly man-made environment or maybe horticulture type environment where you're individually managing each plant and adding supplemental lighting and water and fertilizers to it and it has its own value but it was not making sense to me when I was going to events and farmers were talking about walking their fields picking out nails and I just think I just started to really dig in more to the fiber and grain side of it because you could see how it would match up for Kansas farmers and how the CBD production just had a different application that was really not going to be acreage section. So the 2018 Farm Bill allowed for the commercial licensing and then this slide just kind of zeroes in on Kansas a little bit from 2014 going on. So once the 18 Farm Bill came out, you could just have a commercial license in Kansas that allowed you to have a few more acres than before and you didn't have to submit the research proposal but at that time I changed my research proposal over to fiber and grain production and applied for the SARA grant and in that 2021 season we had a group of five growers and we tested a lot of different things and I'll go back to that slide before this but we looked at six different genetics. We had a planting window that was over a month long. We had some people that drilled, some people that planted, we had 15 intros and 30 intros. They were all non-irrigated but they were around four, five different areas of the state so spread out geographically and with that different weather conditions and really had very little success in that year. The three acre section in Manhattan did well but the other sections basically were the weeds just took them out and they were not harvestable crops. So in 2022 with the SARA grant we narrowed in and we didn't have a very large a planting window. We only tried two varieties and those were the varieties that had performed the year before. We all did 30 inch rows. They all cultivated manually with a disc in between the rows for for weed management and we had quite a bit better results. I have a slide coming up on the results but I just want to highlight the outreach efforts so we're also part of the grant. We did quarterly webinars this last season and in the year before as well with the SARA grant then. We did quarterly webinars in a field day in the summer and that's a picture of the field day there and Kansans for him, the planted association and Kansans for him, Kansas hemp consortium all worked together on those and it was good. We had two TV news stories on the Kansas City and Topeka area that came out to the hemp field and really nailed the story about fiber and grain production and it being different than CBD production. Had regulators out there and it was a nice chance to just provide more education. We're all about the education and outreach on this crop because there's just so much information to make up for and so much bad information to overcome. So we really appreciate that element of the grant and the connections and the people that had allowed us to you know bring together in a sustainable way that we're going to continue those conversations and continue making advancements. This slide here I want to just bring attention. This is reflected nationally too in the number of hemp acres and production growers around the country and you can see in 2019 harvested acres or 1800 and in 2020 harvested acres in Kansas down to 760 and in 2022 harvested acres this number is about 415. So that was really the low point 2021 and a lot of producers like us had weed pressure. There's no approved pesticides, no approved herbicides for hemp right now and so manual cultivation is a tool that we've been able to use but a lot of people suffered a lot of loss due to that barrier and the whole shaking out and separation of the CBD market and the fiber grain market is also happening at that time. So I really hope that 2021 is the low point for production in Kansas and that those acres start to climb because we have also made the flip where it was 95 percent floral material licenses or at about 85 percent fiber grain production licenses. So it is actually a net win on the number of acres for fiber and grain when you realize how many of them were devoted to CBD at the beginning and so if we made that that graph turned would be going in the right direction and I think it will continue that way. Also as a result of just the networking and the collaboration with these different groups over the past two years we've actually just introduced language in the Kansas legislature, House Bill 2861 last week and we're really hoping that could help lower license fees for producers right now Kansas has among the highest fees in the country about $1,700 annually to grow industrial hemp and that also is background check fingerprints are still required. There's a planting you know you have to have your license by March 15th there's many reports along the way and there's crop sampling at the end and the language that we've introduced would allow performance based sampling which the USDA has approved of other states it would also allow us to feed hemp seed mill to horses and companion animals and it would lower the fees for producers. So I really there's a lot of ripple effects that have come from these build days and these relationships that have formed over education and outreach so I think it's important to try and mention that and really hope that we can make it happen this legislative session it seems like there's quite a bit of support and legislators who are listening can really clearly see these are fiber and green crops they should be treated like much more traditional commodities and not like they're they're not a specialty crop and we need to you know open it up and treat them like corn, soybeans, wheat. So we'll kind of land back around on 2022 this is the hemp field in Manhattan this was the best one of our trials this was this is about 24 and a half acres well actually this section is smaller here's another little section and then there's also one front section for this field so combined it's 24 acres but this is from the field day and the trucks that are out there were people that were attending and really a beautiful stand a lot of this front corner is kind of where we entered the field so there was a little patch there that didn't perform very well it's kind of at the lower the bottom of the field but overall a really beautiful field and he had both nice grain production and a thick stand for the the bale biomass production as well he had more rain and more moderate temperatures throughout the season than any of our other fields so in Dodge City we had two gentlemen there that farmed both of them had non-harvestable crops all of our fields have been non-irrigated I know we could perform probably better on irrigated ground but it just has we've really tried to see what genetics would work on non-irrigated ground and so that has been our focus we also have focused on genetics that are our grain dominant you know if you want to grow for fiber you plant at a higher density people are generally planting the Chinese varieties where they are making textiles out of him in the in that country so there the plant looks more like bamboo you plant it really close together it shoots more straight up and it doesn't really have a much green just because but the varieties that we grow that we tried and narrowed in on our grain variety so all of the fields planted those grain varieties and they're all non-irrigated for the things that are common and then differences in their soil and their results are included here so western Kansas very dry and very poor performing fields their prop community college which is more kind of on the edge of western Kansas they had 10 acres and wasn't a great stand but still pretty good grain production and it was performed better than the corn fields that were next to it which were completely dead and I think really something to highlight with the prop community college connection there is that when we went out right before they harvested the very end of august um yeah like is about august 29th we went out and they brought their students from their ag and society class and you know there's 20 or 30 kids out there that are studying and a lot of them come from farming families the one that had been managing the field is definitely a farming family from the area and they're out there watching birds come and asking if they could hunt it they were eating the grain right out of the field it was just a really good opportunity to educate the next generation of farmers about the possibilities of hemp and how much more varied it is than you might have thought when you are maybe more quickly associating it with cannabis so there's the results for manhattan like i said that was the best performing field had a good harvest um i have the breakdowns of pounds per acre of acre pounds per acre of the grain pounds per acre of the fiber bales um the next field was in leon Kansas so that's closest to where we are in in Augusta in Wichita the field there was also pretty good um again non-irrigated very hot and dry at the end of the season and his his stocks were good but the inside of his seed heads all dried up and died so that was a very sad he all the way to the end of the season you finally have a good stand the weeds were were a little bit more manageable a lot more manageable than last year and then um what he and he did harvest the grain separately so he harvested the grain and then we ran purity tests and germination tests on it it's um you know not good so um definitely we think the agronomists thought from the um seed company that it was drought related and we had been out there around that same like september first in his field and they the seeds were not like that um but then by the end of september early october when he harvested they were all dried up and black inside so that was another tough lesson in the in the world of growing industrial hemp um generally just for people that are and will any questions on the research we can come back around to by just do like to encourage people that are considering industrial hemp if they want to grow it to reach out if they um are interested in processing or process material which would be herd fiber grain um micro ionized fiber dust there's so many opportunities and so many needed pieces of the supply chain right now for a whole infrastructure to develop that it's an exciting time and it's um there's risk and there's pitfalls but there's also a lot of opportunity and a lot of cool people that are involved that you can network with and meet and kind of find your lane you know whatever your maybe current business is or your current farming model is there's a way to weave into that that um you know is beneficial so happy to help people think about that even you know if you're in insurance or accounting there's just a lot of ancillary support for the industry that requires people to understand the crop and see it as different than than cannabis and see it as truly a potential provider of protein for humans and animals and also biodegradable fiber these are some hemp products that you can buy today that have wood flooring is available there's a lot of hemp part food um hemp seed oil food on the market but almost all of it's coming from canada right now and they have not had the same length of prohibition so i think for the past maybe 20 years you have been able to grow industrial hemp in canada and so they've developed developed their grain market very thoroughly and all hemp food pretty much on the shelf that you would find at your grocery store is coming from there so that's an area of opportunity that we hemp seeds are about 30 percent protein they're high in fiber they're high in omega-3s and 6s and like i said you can buy them on the shelf but right now there's an afco prohibition against feeding them to animals so there's a long process underway right now that will open up hemp in seed mill for laying hens and then the next application would be for broilers and then cattle dairy cattle but each one of those afco ingredients is approved for a specific animal and so it takes a long time a lot of money for research and application to move those um to move hemp seed mill into the approved ingredient list for each one of those animals so it's another area of opportunity that's unsettled and kind of you know it's headed in the right direction but you can't really build or scale around it at this particular moment because you don't you don't really know the timeline when it's going to be approved and maybe like the specifics of um what it what it will look like but i think um i think feed operations are maybe starting to see the value of being able to grow hemp in Kansas and feed it to cattle and candles or feed it to chickens in Missouri um as as a sustainable crop and then important food for animals in addition to people that kind of concludes the slides and the presentation i'm sure i forgot quite a few things and skipped over some tearful moments of sad fields but as as beautiful but there we've learned a lot along the way we had a lot of good involvement from growers around the state and there's a lot of people that really see the potential and want it to work and see that it's coming you know that we have new crops that come in it's very important to add healthy rotations to a traditional production farm and that's what we can do here so if we just keep at it and share share the failures and then share the winds i think we can Kansas has the potential to return to being a hemp state we were a leading producer before prohibition and i think we can we have the right environment to get back to it but it matters policy matters um it definitely matters in this space as far as are you encouraging production are you discouraging production and we've got you know some barriers to remove for really that to be all the way on the encouraging side right now but i think all those those dominoes are on their way towards falling Sarah thank you that there's like a lot of threads there and i feel like i'm struck by like how you're had to like simultaneously think about how do you grow this in a way that works with your soils and different parts of Kansas and then also how do you simultaneously build the market and navigate this whole new regulatory landscape and i just kudos to you as a farmer for your having that for other farmers out there who are like kind of curious about hemp growing hemp for fiber and grain um what were some of the questions that you would help over do you find that people are like oh how do you help kind of ease their mind about trying something new because that's a big thing especially when you have like i do you've mentioned this is like storied history of hemp in our country i think it's always about can you make money with the crop um that be a high level concern for anybody that makes their living farming obviously um so we have tried to for sure buy buyers for your crop so that's included that is a guarantee if you can have a successful crop that's what we can't guarantee but it is about making money and right now i'd say we're pretty because i'm just so grateful for the grant because it doesn't really make money at this particular moment and we've always pretty much encouraged anybody that's just kind of asking to start small so when you pay 1700 dollars worth of fees and you maybe grow 20 or 40 or 50 acres that's hard to you know spread out over enough acres to not really impact your bottom line and i wouldn't want someone to just try a thousand acres their first season you know it's your you're probably gonna face some um less than 100 success on your year one so let's try to learn get familiar do this oil sampling figure out your best chances for success eliminate as many risks as we can and then still try a moderate um acreage to keep your risk low so to be frank and say it's probably not going to make money but as a participant in the grant we were able to offset the cost for the growers i really don't think we would be able to talk people into otherwise because they lose money i mean they would be losing money without me being able to supplement um their their costs on fuel and equipment and we bought their seed for them and then we really helped with going through the licensing meeting all those deadlines understanding like you get a portal through the kda go in and tell them you're gonna harvest and then it's all time bounded when you actually have to be finished um so kind of taking the you know you don't have just have to go read the regulations we're kind of digested i'll tell you what they the the short end version of them is um but it's a very difficult self at the end of the day it's tough to talk farmers into that i think that's why you see declining numbers in the state of Kansas and i do hope the legislation that will lower the fees and allow performance based sampling of the crop will encourage people to get involved just give us a call and we'll you know be happy to talk what is your soil type what did you grow there last year all of those kinds of questions we can just kind of chat and see where it goes is there anything in your heart right now that feels like you really want to share that would feel on set if we didn't give you the opportunity you can do that for it um thank you again to Sarah i just as i said the opportunity has been and even you know like this video and getting to talk that'll help more people see opportunities that are coming their way in industrial hemp and if you are interested in growing and we can be helpful the ks consortium we developed the planting guide through this grant funding that is on there and it's free to download it is specific to Kansas it is specific to grain production so if you are you know have other end uses in mind it might not be the most helpful but also the quarterly webinars are on there um and past even like some shorter lunch and learn type videos are on there and all that was made possible through the Sarah funding and the collaborations that resulted from it and i hope it shows a great resource for everybody that wants to sniff around and kind of research on their own time and start thinking about how it fits at your farm or at your manufacturing facility or on your table