This fall, for the first time since 1970, growers throughout the United States were set to harvest federally legal hemp. Growers had purchased seeds and tended fields throughout the summer. But toward the end of the growing season, many of them realized that their plants weren’t turning out as expected — and at worst, that their entire crop would have to be destroyed.
While their corn and soybeans had, as usual, sprouted all at once and grown to a uniform size, new hemp plants tended to grow on different schedules, to different heights. Sometimes there weren’t that many hemp plants at all, because only a small percentage of the seeds had sprouted. The most dramatic surprise, however, was to farmers who had intended to plant hemp with a high concentration of the chemical compound known as CBD — a potentially lucrative prospect given the ingredient’s addition to everything from lattes to pet treats — and instead ended up growing what the federal government classifies as marijuana.
The problem is that while the race to plant hemp has taken off at a sprint, with 17,000 farmers applying for licenses this year alone, the race to study hemp, which has also been essentially banned wherever the crop was illegal, is a marathon that is just getting started. Published research, seed certification processes, and understanding of the hemp plant’s genome are all lagging behind the plant’s rapid commercial adoption.
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