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Have you had ice wine? The sweet dessert wine is made from grapes frozen on the vine, requiring a large labor force to harvest the entire crop within hours after the first morning of adequately cold temperature.

Outdoor marijuana farmers in Colorado had to use the ice-wine harvesting method after an unexpected snowstorm hit much of the state last October. “We ended up having three days of freezing rain and snow last October. In that time period, we had all of our facilities filled with plants,” recalls Bob DeGabrielle, CEO of Los Sueños Farms, a 36-acre cannabis farm in Pueblo County. “From a bud product prospective, we felt like we lost about $7 million last year.”

Many American farmers were handed seeds of opportunity in October, when the United States Department of Agriculture released its much-anticipated regulations for farming hemp. The new federal rules came nearly a year after Congress legalized hemp farming, and almost half a decade after the Colorado Department of Agriculture established its own program for farming hemp. And this state’s rules don’t exactly line up with the ones just announced by the feds.

Two years after voters approved Amendment 64, legalizing recreational marijuana, Colorado decided to opt into the 2014 Farm Bill, a federal law that allowed states to create pilot programs for hemp licensing. As a result, Colorado is now one of the largest producers of hemp in the country. While every Colorado farmer growing hemp will probably have to change a few things once the federal regulations take hold, those same regulations also bring credibility to an industry essentially stuck in a federal gray area, according to Corey Cox, an attorney with Vicente Sederberg who represents clients in Colorado’s hemp industry.

Colorado is on the short list of states whose farmers will soon be eligible for federal crop insurance.

Hemp had been barred from eligibility for protection through the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation because of its similarities to marijuana. With the passage of 2018’s Farm Bill, however, hemp officially became a legal crop for farmers — if their respective states chose to legalize hemp farming

“My whole life lately seems to be about hemp,” says Lily Morgan. And for good reason: The founder of Colorado-based skin care company Lily Farm Fresh Skin Care has owned and operated eighty acres of farmland to supply her own production in Keenesburg, Colorado, for over thirty years, Now nearly 90 percent of it is devoted to hemp.

Morgan, who also owns an additional 170-plus acres spread throughout the state, has been making cleansers, moisturizers, toners, lip balms and other products for her certified organic skin care line since 1986. But she’s recently shifted, jumping on the CBD bandwagon and growing hemp for her new CBD-infused line of therapeutic lotions.

Well, that didn’t take long: Less than a week after Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed a bill that expanded marijuana business investment opportunities for publicly traded companies, venture capitalists and private equity firms, one of the state’s largest pot corporations announced plans to scoop up two commercial marijuana operations, including the largest legal outdoor cultivation in North America.

On June 5, Medicine Man Technologies announced that it had reached binding agreements with Los Sueños Farms, an outdoor marijuana farm on 36 acres outside Pueblo, as well as Mesa Organics Ltd, which owns a commercial cultivation, dispensary and extraction facility in Pueblo.

The moment the hemp industry has been waiting for finally happened: President Donald Trump just signed the 2018 Farm Bill, legalizing industrial hemp in the United States.

Although highly anticipated after congressional approval last week, full-scale hemp legalization wasn’t official until Trump signed the Farm Bill, a set of agricultural policies voted on every five years or so. Spurred by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the 2018 bill’s hemp provisions catapult the plant’s farming opportunities from state pilot programs to a nationwide scale by removing hemp from the Controlled Substances Act and treating it like an agricultural product.

Hemp, marijuana’s non-psychoactive counterpart, can be turned into a large variety of products. And in 2016, Colorado farmers produced half of the hemp grown in the United States. Even after more states started growing the crop in 2017, Colorado still planted over three times more of it than any other state in the country, with North Dakota and Kentucky following next, according to the Colorado Department of Agriculture.

But Colorado’s ability to process the plant is limited, because it doesn’t have a decorticator, a machine that separates hemp’s stringy outer layer, called the baste, from its woody core, known as the hurd. Traditional farming equipment and wood chippers get jammed up by the fibers, a kink that Cuno Hansen, head of clothing company All Seeing Colorado LLC, aims to fix by bringing in the state’s first decorticator.

There’s a reason most cannabis cultivations in Colorado are in warehouses: People are scared. Afraid of the elements, pests and the unknowns of farming under the sun, most growers prefer to stay inside, taking control of their environments and nurturing their delicate crops with extreme care. Even if growers wanted to venture outdoors, many local governments in densely populated areas, like the City of Denver’s, ban outdoor operations. Travel up to the mountains, however, and you’ll find a tougher breed of both plant and grower.

Aurora’s Mayflower Farms is one of the largest grow operations in the state, and it’s getting even bigger. In November, Mayflower will add an extraction lab for concentrates as well as a kitchen at its facility; in the new year, it will open its own retail store.

In February 2015, the new cannabis company took over an old Mayflower Moving warehouse (hence the name) and started overhauling the place; it had plants in the ground eleven months later, says CEO Bruce Douglass. It currently has five rooms totaling about 3,000 square feet devoted to growing flower, and has gone through eight harvests since January. Each harvest garners about 100 pounds of product. Today Mayflower has 3,600 plants in its facility, but come November it will up that to 6,000.

The state’s growing regions can be dangerous.

Here’s your daily round-up of pot-news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Download WeedWeek’s free 2016 election guide here.

Two women were arrested for detaining four brothers on a California pot farm and forcing them to work for six months. In Colorado, 14 Chinese nationals were arrested at an illegal grow. Authorities are investigating whether they were “labor trafficked.”

In SFWeekly, I recommended that the industry adopt an abuse-free product certification to curtail worker exploitation.

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