Source: aspendailynews.com
A Glenwood Springs entrepreneur with big dreams for the Western Slope’s hemp industry is warning that few Colorado farmers will plant hemp this spring if a federal ban on shipping hemp seeds across state and national lines isn’t lifted soon.
Barbara Filippone, whose Glenwood Springs-based company EnviroTextiles imports and sells hemp and other natural fibers, said hundreds of Colorado farmers have contacted her in recent months asking where to get hemp for the coming growing season.
“I have notebook with contact for at least 100 interested farmers, and three to five more calling me every day,” Filippone said.
Few growers can source seed from within Colorado, since only one rogue farmer — Ryan Loflin of Springfield — harvested a major hemp crop in 2013. Under federal law, which classifies hemp as a controlled substance alongside its psychoactive cousin marijuana, shipping non-sterile hemp seed in from neighboring countries like Canada is also illegal.
That means that Colorado farmers determined to plant hemp in the spring may have to bend or break the law to get their seed, and risk losing federal crop insurance, farm subsidies or other aid from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in the process.
“Farmers are risk averse, and you’re asking them to take a big risk by planting hemp,” said Mick McAllister, communications director for the Rocky Mountain Farmer’s Union.
McAllister said he knows of only one farmer of his 3,500-member organization with definite plans to plant hemp this spring. Farmers, he said, are intimidated by raids like the one that the federal Drug Enforcement Administration conducted on an industrial hemp operation run by South Dakota’s Lakota Sioux Indian tribe in the year 2000.
“Don’t know if we will [plant hemp] yet,” wrote Ken Sack, the owner of the Silt-based organic farm Eagle Springs Organic, in an email. Sack has expressed interest in growing hemp this spring, but said he’s still deciding whether to go forward. “Will have to see if seeds are available in [Colorado],” he wrote.
Like marijuana, hemp is a variety of cannabis sativa, but it contains almost none of pot’s intoxicating THC. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world to ban industrial hemp, which can be used to make food, fabric, building materials and a wide range of other products.
Colorado’s hemp-related legal limbo endures despite the fact that Colorado voters legalized industrial hemp alongside recreational marijuana when they passed Amendment 64 in 2012. The Colorado Department of Agriculture finalized the state’s industrial hemp rules last fall.
Under the rules, hemp farmers can begin registering with the state starting on March 1. They’ll have to pay a fee of $200 plus $1 for every acre planted, and submit to random inspections by state officials meant to insure that their hemp crop contains less than 0.3 percent THC.
Yet despite its regulatory framework, the state has little to say about where Colorado farmers ought to look for seed. In fact, state officials have adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy on the matter.
“How farmers are getting seed is a good question,” said Ron Carleton, Colorado’s Deputy Commissioner of Agriculture. “We are just doing a registration and inspection program. We are not asking, in the registration process, the source of the seed.”
Carleton said the ongoing seed shortage would likely affect enrollment in the first year of the state’s hemp production program, and the shortage could even endure into next year’s growing season if shipping hemp remains federally illegal.
“In order to avoid breaking federal law a farmer would have to get [the seed] from within Colorado,” Carleton clarified. He said that neither his department nor the office of Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper have yet made a formal request to the federal Justice Department to lift its ban on shipping hemp.
There are glimpses of hemp legalization on the federal level: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently asked Attorney General Eric Holder to review hemp’s legal status as a controlled substance, and a bill called the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013 is set for review by legislative committees in both houses of Congress.
Until the federal law changes, though, Filippone wants the Justice Department to issue an executive order declaring that farmers will not be prosecuted for sourcing seed from countries like Canada, whose hemp industry is thriving, or for planting seed sent to them by anonymous hemp activists who may have sourced the stuff illegally.
Filippone recently heard from an eastern Colorado farmer who had received a mysterious shoebox full of hemp seeds from someone called “the hemp stork” who didn’t list a return address.
The farmer planted some of the seeds, Filippone said, before realizing that it was illegal to ship hemp and that he could be complicit in a federal crime.
“He was terrified,” Filippone recalled, speculating that the seeds probably came from a hemp legalization activist “who was not considering things like federal regulations, federal subsidies or crop insurance.”
An executive order from the Justice Department, Filippone said, could protect such farmers from prosecution and allow Colorado’s hemp industry to get off the ground.
McAllister of the Rocky Mountain Farmer’s Union agreed, but he said such an order wouldn’t completely protect Colorado’s farmers from prosecution since it could be undone by a future presidential administration.
“If that happened the gates [of Colorado’s industry] would start to open, but technically you are still not safe,” McAllister said.
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