By Jakob Rodgers
Source:
gazette.com
Colorado's newest cash crop is bright green, sports long leaves and remains largely illegal across the United States. It's also better worn as clothing than smoked in a bong.
While the rollout of recreational marijuana took center stage in Colorado last year, a separate industry devoted to producing hemp - pot's nonpsychoactive but incredibly useful cousin - grew in its shadow. And after a sluggish start in 2014, hemp growers across the Pikes Peak region say the industry is ripe for expansion in the new year.
Scores of newly created businesses in Colorado are getting creative. Hemp coffee, spun insulation, paper fiber, rope and dietary supplements all appeared on registration forms submitted in 2014 to the Colorado Department of Agriculture, which regulates the hemp industry. One Colorado company plans to use it for improved graphite batteries.
"I think 2015 will be a much more successful harvest for outdoor grows than 2014 was," said Kashif Shan, whose Colorado Springs-based business, Whole Hemp Company, plans to add 35,000 square feet of greenhouse space in the coming months. "2014 was a frustrating year for everybody."
What is hemp?
To people outside the industry, confusion abounds about the differences between hemp and marijuana.
Hemp and marijuana derive from the same plant, cannabis, so they look identical. Techniques for cultivating each variety are largely similar. Further, some plants grown from the seeds of a cross-pollinated hemp plant could easily be classified as marijuana.
The difference is in its chemical makeup: Hemp is classified as any cannabis plant with no more than 0.3 percent tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is the substance that gives pot users a high. Exceed that amount and it legally becomes marijuana.
While it offers no buzz, hemp can be used to create or improve a seemingly endless list of strong, durable and even environmentally friendly products - facts the nation's Founding Fathers apparently knew well.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the nation's first and third presidents, were among thousands of hemp farmers across the United States. The British navy used it for sails, Bibles were printed on hemp paper, and some entrepreneurs in the early 1900s used it for biofuel.
But a federal tax on cannabis passed in 1937 began limiting its production, and it became illegal in 1970 with passage of the federal Controlled Substances Act, which lumped it in the same category as marijuana.
Despite the law, the United States boasts a hearty hemp market. While it can't be produced in most of U.S., it can be imported - a practice netting an estimated $500 million or more in retail sales of hemp-based products in 2012, according to the Hemp Industries Association.
Colorado legalized hemp production with the passage in 2012 of Amendment 64, the voter-approved measure best known for allowing recreational marijuana sales in the state.
In March, Colorado agriculture officials began accepting applications to license the state's first industrial hemp companies.
Interest proved vast.
As of mid-December, the state tallied 131 registrants and 259 grow sites totaling 1,811.7 acres.
Four businesses exist in El Paso County, and Teller County has three.
"It's not that this (hemp) doesn't work here - it's not that it's not a useful product," said Zev Paiss, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Hemp Association. "It was just for political reasons; it was basically stalled back in the 1930s."
Growing businesses
Shan's business in east Colorado Springs is ready to expand.
Specially designed lights and a sophisticated, climate-controlled facility serve as Shan's incubator for row upon row of hemp plants, which appear identical to their marijuana counterparts. He dries the harvested plant material and uses it to produce therapeutic oils, all largely for doctors in Brazil.
The oils are low in THC but high in cannabidiol, or CBD - the chemical found in cannabis that is prized for its medicinal uses. Parents of epileptic children increasingly claim CBD-rich oils can reduce the frequency and severity of seizures, and families have flocked to Colorado seeking it.
Teller County-based Stanley Brothers Social Enterprises produces the best-known of these oils, called Charlotte's Web. But many similar startups have sprouted across the state.
Shan moved his business from California to Colorado Springs about six months ago and plans to build four 8,500-square-foot greenhouses in early 2015 - a vast improvement from his current 8,000-square-foot space, he said. Sales of his product, called Revivid, are also expected to begin this year in Colorado.
"We definitely feel that the cost of CBD right now . it's too high for a lot of people who need it," Shan said. "And that's something that we want to address as time goes by."
Other businesses, including several in the Pikes Peak region, have different plans.
A building contractor who prefers to use all-natural materials, Nikolai Woolf plans to produce hempcrete - a concrete-like material made with the core of a hemp stalk. His company, Colorado Hempery Ltd., has about an acre of land in Manitou Springs to grow hemp plants.
Woolf declined to discuss many of the ways he plans to use the plant, saying they are in development. And while he acknowledged that high-CBD strains are an interest, that isn't all.
"We're interested in using the whole plant," Woolf said. "The fibers in it are among the strongest around, if you have the right processing equipment."
Challenges ahead
Despite growing interest, myriad challenges could threaten hemp's expansion in Colorado.
Woolf complained that scant equipment exists in Colorado to process hemp on a large scale - such as decorticators, which can strip away the outer layers of a hemp plant at harvest.
Some hemp companies encountered difficulty finding a place to test their plants for THC levels after testing facilities faced greater scrutiny from state regulators on what they can, and cannot, analyze - leaving some companies unable to test hemp. There are, however, at least a few companies working to meet that demand, said Duane Sinning, the state Agriculture Department's assistant director of plant industries.
Adding to the equation will be a revision of state licensing and regulatory guidelines for the hemp industry that will be considered in the coming months by the Agriculture Department. Registration fees, license types and state inspections will be considered.
The industry's biggest challenge in 2014 may have been simply finding something to plant.
With mass commercial hemp production illegal across much of the United States - a consequence of the federal government's prohibition of cannabis - growers in Colorado faced immense hurdles in getting enough seeds, Paiss said.
A virtual "don't ask, don't tell" policy governed Colorado growers' seed acquisition throughout 2014, people across the industry said.
"People were jokingly saying that most of the seed arrived by stork," Paiss said.
Even if companies could secure seed, its quality varied dramatically.
Traveling salesmen sold seeds to unassuming businesses owners, and those seeds failed to grow as advertised - sometimes leaving farmers with plants that exceeded THC regulations.
Overall, 31 percent of tests done on hemp plants by state officials registered too much THC. But most were between 0.3 percent and 1 percent, the Agriculture Department said. THC levels above 1 percent are considered intoxicating.
Many failed because some growers conducted breeding work with marijuana and hemp - leading state regulators to recently recommend restricting how closely together hemp and marijuana can be grown, Sinning said.
But the lack of properly vetted seeds for the state's first harvest also caused problems.
"There are failures - it's the first year," Sinning said. "Most of the plant material in the state is from unknown
sources."
One Colorado Springs company plans to address that issue.
Feno Seed Bank aims to produce and sell highly specialized hemp seeds for sale across Colorado, said Jason Knox, the company's co-owner and chief executive.
He is working on different types of seeds that would be used for specific purposes - such as one type to grow high-CBD hemp plants and another type better used for hemp clothing. His first seeds, which were grown from a few plants cultivated from his time as a medical caregiver, recently hit the market in Colorado Springs.
More varied seed types catering to the nutritional and biofuel industries could be developed, he said.
"We're aiming at really expanding into all those individual uses, to meet the 25,000 known uses for hemp," Knox said.
