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Marijuana might win Colorado points, but it’s hemp that will make the state a real winner in this game. As the country’s leader in acreage devoted to hemp farming over the past two years, Colorado has a real head start on the growing industry, and it’s Kate Greenberg’s job to keep us in the lead.

The new director of the Colorado Department of Agriculture is responsible for many things, including overseeing the state’s industrial hemp program, which churns out the plants responsible for all of those CBD products we love so much. But keeping things on course has it challenges, such as looming federal regulations and more domestic competition thanks to the passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, which legalized industrial hemp farming at the federal level.

To learn more about the future of hemp in Colorado, we chatted with Greenberg about her goals for the plant.

When House Bill 1286 passed last year, advocates thought it would mark the beginning of a new era for children who use medical marijuana. So far, though, they’re still waiting.

The bill expanded on a 2016 law that allowed child patients to take their MMJ medication at school. That law required that the medication be administered by a child’s MMJ caregiver, usually the parents. The newer measure — known as Quintin’s amendment, in honor of nine-year-old epilepsy patient Quintin Lovato in Eagle County — allows school personnel to also administer medication, to help patients faster and ease the burden on parents. The proposal passed through the state legislature by relatively wide margins.

However, of the 178 school districts in Colorado, we found just one district that has implemented the policy so far, and it allows school personnel to administer only CBD medication. That district is Eagle County Schools, the district Lovato attends.

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.

Congress made long-awaited history this week when it put language that would legalize industrial hemp in the 2018 Farm Bill, which President Donald Trump is expected to sign into law.

Colorado, which has more acreage devoted to registered hemp farms than any other state under a pilot program, is better equipped for the predicted boom than most of the country. Appearing in a joint press conference on December 14 outside the cannabis law firm Vicente Sederberg, several key members of the Colorado Legislature and the hemp industry shared their enthusiasm over new opportunities opened up by the Farm Bill.

Fourth-generation farmer Randy Taylor has watched potential income disappear as a hailstorm obliterated plants on the 7,000 acres that he oversees. But having to destroy crops himself is a tougher pill to swallow.

In December, on what he calls “probably some of the hardest days in my life,” Taylor mowed down eighty acres of hemp that had spiked THC levels. The Colorado Department of Agriculture had told the Yuma farmer that his hemp was too hot, above the 0.3 percent THC limit that defines industrial hemp under state law. Taylor’s crop measured at 0.47 percent THC, over the limit by just 0.17 percent.

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.


The two-month period during which Colorado farmers could register to grow industrial hemp for the 2014 growing season closed on May 1. And as of 4:30 p.m. that day, state records show that 42 people or businesses were approved to grow hemp and another 53 had applied but were not yet approved.
And there may be more on the way. Colorado Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Christi Lightcap says more applications may trickle in, since they simply had to be postmarked — not received — by May 1. A few of the applicants stand out, including a county government and Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

Ben Droz.
Hemp growing in Colorado.


Thirteen producers have registered to legally grow hemp in Colorado in the month since registration began, according to the state Department of Agriculture. However, those thirteen producers hold a total of twenty registrations, as several of them are registered to grow in more than one location or for more than one purpose. Ten of the registrations are for commercial purposes, while the other ten are for research and development. The Denver Westword spoke with three producers, who told the paper about their plans for planting marijuana’s sober stepsister.

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