Before the first seed was tucked into Texas soil, farmers and investors eager for a different kind of green revolution flocked to Dallas in January for the Texas Hemp Convention. It was the state’s largest such gathering yet, the culmination of a year’s worth of buzz following the Texas Legislature’s 2019 legalization of industrial hemp. Part of the cannabis family, the plant, unlike its relative cannabis, contains only trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive compound. But it is rich in CBD, a chemical component used as an ingredient in FDA-approved medication and in home remedies to treat anxiety, pain, insomnia, and even seizures.
Among the 15,000 attendees was fourth-generation Matagorda County farmer Troy Owen, who hoped to nab his share of a burgeoning industry projected to be worth more than $20 billion nationally midway through this decade. It wasn’t his first hemp rodeo: Owen and his partners had travelled to another expo in Nashville, spent a week in Kentucky at a Farm Journal program, and another visiting seed dealers in Colorado. In Dallas, however, Owen noticed something different about the attendees: half weren’t farmers, but simply curious observers there to witness the beginning of cannabis cultivation in the state. Many traveled from afar to see what the buzz was about, browsing aisles of CBD gummies and sniffing smokable hemp flower. But from those with experience, Owen received words of caution. In a panel on the unexpected challenges of growing hemp, farmers warned of its sensitivity to the elements; they said growers wouldn’t make easy money, particularly not in Texas, far south of where the plant typically thrives.
Owen saw what they were talking about after he became one of the first Texans to receive a hemp grower’s license from the state at the end of April and attempted to grow five hundred acres of the crop. In early May, a four-inch rain drowned his first batch of seedlings. He reworked the ground and replanted in June, but those seedlings dried out in the South Texas heat. The two failures left him with six-figure losses. “It was about as big of a mess as you could ever imagine,” he told me.
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