Source: forbes.com
Daniel Dolgin and Mark Justh in a field of hemp at JD Farms (Credit: Jessica Barthel)
When Daniel Dolgin was working on counterterrorism for the Director of National Intelligence, he never would have believed that he’d soon co-own and -operate the farm cultivating New York’s first legal industrial hemp crop in eight decades.
Not only did Dolgin, 40, assume he’d have a future in the career he’d chosen and trained for at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, but before 2014 growing hemp was illegal throughout the US.
He left government a few years ago for what he assumed would be a temporary hiatus to explore other opportunities. But when he was introduced to Mark Justh, 51, the haitus quickly turned into a whole new career direction.
Justh, who had recently quit JPMorgan Chase after decades on Wall Street to spend more time on the farm he had bought in 2008, told Dolgin he was thinking about planting industrial hemp as a cover crop to help with his hay production.
With his experience in DC, Dolgin thought he could help navigate the bureaucracy to get a license to grow the crop, something that New York had started allowing in restricted circumstances in 2014.
“I never thought I’d grow up to buy a farm and become a farmer, per se, but I realized what he was doing was big business,” recalls Dolgin. “It’s providing value to the agricultural community in a variety of different ways.”
Hemp can be made into a large number of useful things, including clothing, rope, paper, construction materials, cosmetics, animal feed, food, and beverages. Now that nut-free, dairy-free diets are increasingly popular, hemp has the potential to become very popular as a food. Hemp can be consumed in many forms, for example, as milk, oil, granola, gluten-free flour, hemp seed butter, or protein powder.
A Short History of Hemp in the US
From the colonial era through World War II, the US hemp industry was important—even central—to the country’s development. With hemp as the main fiber used for ships’ rigging and sails, British colonies in the Americas were required by law to cultivate it to supply the maritime power.
Hemp continued to be essential to pre-industrial American life, and even played a big part in World War II, when the USDA’s Hemp for Victory campaign encouraged a spike in its production.
After the war, the widespread availability of new cheap synthetic fibers, combined with the anticompetitive actions of businesspeople taking advantage of a political climate of racism and anti-drug rhetoric, brought on the quick and until-now irrevocable decline of the domestic hemp industry. Hemp was painted with the same disparaging strokes as marijuana, despite being a less-druggy version of cannabis—due to genetics and cultivation, it has very low levels of the cannabinoid THC that gives pot its heady effect.
This month’s election saw the legalization of recreational marijuana in four new states (California, Nevada, Maine, and Massachusetts). And with pot consumption now legal in half of all states for either medical or recreational purposes, the long-dormant business of hemp production may well be poised for a renaissance.
With liberalizing views and policies of this controversial plant, new possibilities are slowly opening up for an industry that used to be a central part of American life. Section 7606 of the 2014 Farm Billstipulated that universities and state departments of agriculture could start growing industrial hemp for a specific set of purposes.
The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2015, introduced into Congress, proposes to amend the Controlled Substances Act to exclude industrial hemp (containing no more than 0.3% THC) from the definition of marijuana. Passage of the act would transform the hemp industry in a big way.
But as of now, only a few producers under the auspices of the Farm Bill’s rule can legally grow hemp.
‘Tremendous Potential’
One of those is 1,300-acre JD Farms, in the town of Eaton about 230 miles north of New York City, where this year Dolgin and Justh grew 30 acres of hemp amidst vast fields of hay and pastures for pork and cattle. The farmers partnered with SUNY-Morrisville, following a federal requirement that such cultivation be done for research purposes.
Their SUNY-Morrisville partners "saw value in getting hands-on experience with a crop that they anticipate will be legal in years to come,” says Dolgin.
In 2016, New York passed an amendment to the federal law permitting growers like JD Farms to process, transport, distribute, and sell the crop once it has been grown for as part of a research relationship.
Dolgin and Justh harvested more than a ton of hemp stocks for their first harvest this year. (Stalks are the part of the plant more useful for making things like rope and plyboard, as opposed to the flowers more important for marijuana.) They are now in discussions with interested buyers, from those making food-grade products to companies that turn hemp stalks into biodegradable packaging materials.
“We saw that there was this tremendous potential for hemp,” says Dolgin. “It has 25,000 different usages. It could be a boon to the upstate community. I started coming to the farm more and more and fell in love with what was going on there.”
He is now renovating a house on the farm and is quite sure he won’t go back to government after all. He gets regular inquiries from former colleagues in the Beltway asking how he made such an interesting and drastic career transition.
“The reality is there’s so many other things that people can do,” he says. “There’s never a time when it’s too late.”
And apparently it’s not too late for hemp, either.
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