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Hey, everyone, I am Mitchell Hora.

And I am Zach Johnson, and this is the fieldwork podcast brought to you by farmers,

for farmers.

This show is all about what is working and what is not when it comes to sustainable agriculture.

Today we're going to look into hemp.

And, you know, it was illegal for many years, but now it's making a comeback in the ag industry.

Yeah, that's right. In the 2018 Farm Bill, the federal government took hemp off the list of controlled substances.

So that means that now it's up to the states to decide whether or not they want to legalize him.

So far, there's only a handful of states that actually have commercial programs, but a lot have launched pilot programs.

And I know Minnesota was a pretty early adopter when it came to some of the pilot programs out

there. We actually looked into hemp ourselves, maybe even like five years ago now, but there was some

glitches when it came to, you know, the hoops you had to jump through if we were going to

plant this stuff and kind of, you had to put up signs saying what it was. And then you also

were very encouraged to have it in a field hidden from the general public just so that you

weren't planting it on a major highway. The sheriff really wasn't too fond of what we were thinking.

And then we get into the financing aspect of things where a couple of our lenders who

finance other parts of our operation, they were saying, hey, this is a federally illegal

crop. We can't support you planting that. And so if you make the decision to do that, we're going to have to

make the decision to not work with you when it comes to the financing anymore. So I know that was a

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