It's not for the weak. Every year in late spring, Jeremie Oberbroeckling spent hours in the hot sun hand-planting his crop on a Dubuque County farm. Oberbroeckling was not a typical Iowa farmer — he grew hemp.
"It's a pile of work," he said. "It's a lot of labor. You got to grow the plant, then you got to hang it and get it to a certain percentage of moisture content before you can take it to your extractor to extract the oil."
The hemp industry took off in the tri-state area in 2018 after that year's federal Farm Bill legalized the production of hemp — cannabis plants with a THC concentration of no more than 0.3%. (Plants with a higher concentration of THC are considered marijuana.) Oberbroeckling established the Gen O Farms brand and, like many other growers, began selling CBD products derived from his crop.
Much has changed since. New Iowa regulations last year were a blow to the industry, while market trends have turned local hemp farmers away from growing — including Oberbroeckling. Nonetheless, he and other locals in the industry are looking to the future, hoping to find their place in the market and not let setbacks stop their business growth.
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