By Betsy Freese 1/17/2019
Farmers have a lot of questions about hemp, so we asked expert Michael Bowman, founding chair of the National Hemp Association, to answer a few.
SF: WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF HEMP?
MB: Hemp was poised to be a billion-dollar crop in the 1930s with Henry Ford a big supporter, but the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 killed the growth of the industry. We had a brief respite during WWII with the Hemp for Victory campaign, in which we grew hundreds of thousands of acres in six Midwestern states, but the tax was reenacted after the war. Then in 1970, President Nixon included hemp in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act as his middle finger to the anti-war people.
SF: WHAT IS THE STATUS TODAY?
MB: In 2013, on the heels of Colorado being the first state to legalize industrial hemp, I wrote the language for Section 7606 of the 2014 Farm Bill, a provision that grants U.S. farmers the right to cultivate hemp in states where production is legal. Since that time, we’ve grown the industry from basically zero to 75,000 acres of hemp permitted in 2018.