By Maria McGinnis / Broadcast version by Mary Schuermann Kuhlman
Reporting for the Kent State-Ohio News Connection Collaboration
Ohio's farmers will be growing hemp this spring. It's a risky crop, but these farmers are "the pioneers that are trying to make this work," said one advocate.
They know hemp won't make much of a profit at first, mainly because of regulations, said Julie Doran, founder of the Ohio Hemp Farmers Cooperative.
"All the states might be able to work through their pilot program this 2020 growing season, but after the USDA adopts their final rule on hemp regulations, they're all going to have to adapt to a total THC," she said.
Current USDA rules require that hemp crops don't exceed a total THC content of 0.3%. Hemp contains THCA, an acidic compound, and delta-9 THC, a neutral compound. When exposed to heat or light, THCA converts to delta-9 THC, the main psychoactive component of the cannabis plant.
According to Hemp Industry Daily, crops that exceed the total THC requirement are subject to disposal under USDA rules, resulting in farmers potentially losing most of their investment.
"The Ohio Department of Agriculture is telling farmers to only invest in what they're willing to lose," said Ty Higgins, director of media relations for the Ohio Farm Bureau. "So, if that tells you anything about the market and what the unknowns are in this industry, that would be the thing I would share when it comes to hemp production in Ohio."
The average hemp farm typically is less than five acres.
"I'm always telling them to start on low acreage," Doran said. "This is a very labor-intensive crop, and you're out there every day with your hands and eyes on these plants. It's not something you do from a tractor."
"It's a brand new industry," she said. "No one has been growing this plant for more than four years anywhere in the U.S., so to say we can just start out and be so strict on these regulations and have to comply with all of these; I just really warn, you know, this is a risky business, and we're the pioneers that are trying to make this work."
Another contributor to hemp cultivation risk is where the crop will go after it's harvested. Farmers have to create their own sales opportunities, and there isn't one company waiting to buy their crops.
"When it comes to corn, soybeans or wheat, farmers know their market," explained Higgins. "They know what elevator they're going to sell to and how they're going to move it down the line. With hemp production, the farmer has to find (his or her) own market for hemp. There are different companies out there farmers will have to work one-on-one with in order to create that marketplace and sell their product in the end. It's one of the most important factors of hemp production in Ohio, is where it's going to go once it's grown. And farmers have to figure that out on their own."
GROWING HEMP FOR CBD
The majority of the hemp market focuses on products that include cannabidiol or CBD, the non-psychoactive compound found in cannabis plants. More than 90% of hemp crops are used for CBD, according to Doran.
"It's a totally different plant than your industrial hemp plants for fiber and seed," she said. "It's planted different, it's harvested different and the uses are different. But the majority of everything is being grown for CBD right now because it's medicinal, and it's where the high dollar is right now."
Although the Food and Drug Administration has approved only one CBD-based drug, Epidiolex, to treat two rare forms of seizures, people use CBD to treat a variety of conditions, such as anxiety, chronic pain and insomnia.
While the most money is being made producing hemp for CBD, Higgins noted that it also is a big time and financial investment.
"When it comes to producing CBD oil, there's going to be a lot more maintenance during the growing season and a lot more risk to make sure your THC levels are below legal level to qualify for hemp," he said. "It's going to cost more to produce CBD oil, but on the back end, you'll get more than you will for any other product."
The CBD market is predicted to reach $22 billion by 2022, according to the Brightfield Group, a company that monitors the CBD and cannabis industries.
Despite the optimistic financial predictions for the CBD market, Erica Stark, executive director of the National Hemp Association, said there is no estimate of hemp cultivation profits, as the industry is in a state of flux.
"There's still a lot of wild cards, as far as where that number is going to lie," Stark said. "A lot of that is going to depend on how the FDA chooses to regulate CBD and how much the market is going to continue to grow for CBD products, assuming there is a clear legal regulatory path forward."
HEMP FOR FIBER AND EDIBLE SEEDS
Hemp also can be used for much more than its extracted cannabidiol. Hemp is a strong fiber that can be used in making textiles. It also yields edible seeds with significant nutritional value.
Stark said the fiber and grain side of hemp is a totally different model than CBD cultivation.
"There's still a bottleneck in the processing of hemp fiber," Stark said. "I do anticipate over time as more investment is made into the infrastructure for fiber processing that ultimately, fiber hemp will exceed cannabinoid hemp by a lot. When we start being able to use it for manufacturing processes -- in making building products, car parts, paper, bioplastics and all the things the fiber is useful for -- that's where we're going to see massive amounts of acreage being grown, and markets for that acreage."
Despite the popularity of CBD hemp now, Doran sees industrial hemp being the greater focus in the future. She also pointed to a potential downside for growers of CBD hemp.
"With industrial hemp...there's not enough manufacturers or processors of in-use products for hemp, so we need to really gear up to make industrial hemp more profitable," she said. "But [with] industrial hemp, you can do so much more with than your CBD hemp. I see CBD eventually going indoors, because it's medicinal, and hemp will cross-pollinate. So, the more industrial hemp that is growing outdoors will cross-pollinate your CBD hemp and drive your CBD content down."
HEMP IN OHIO
The rules for hemp in Ohio still are still being written and haven't been finalized by state legislators. Higgins is hopeful that will come in the next few weeks.
"(Farmers) are waiting on those rules to be finalized, waiting to see what licenses they need in order to be official and be able to plant and cultivate and sell hemp in 2020," he said. "So, as much as they're excited about the opportunity of this new crop and seeing what market there is in 2020, I think the focus right now is, 'What do I need to do in order to grow it?' Not that they're not thinking ahead about the market, but I don't think that's the first thing they're concerned about. They just want to know how to get started."
Doran said the basic starting costs will be the licensing fee, which is $500 per location per year in Ohio, and seeds.
"These farmers are looking for a new crop, just because they know what they've been doing for the past 10 to 15 years isn't working out," she said. "So, they're anxious and curious to see, and I always suggest everybody does as much research and go to all the classes they can, because that's how they're going to learn. But there's no professional out there that has been doing this for 20 years. It's really just everyone being open and sharing what works and what doesn't work."
Higgins also predicted there may be too much hemp on the market in the first couple of years, as eager farmers join in the industry.
"Prices will go down, there might not be a market for it, but I think in the long run, once we figure out what the market is, I do think hemp will be a product that's produced in Ohio for the long term," he said. "It's kind of like the Gold Rush. Everybody wants to get started right now and see how they can make an impact in the industry."
There will be a lot of work farmers need to do to keep up with the industry, Higgins added.
"I think 'cautious optimism' would be the words I would use to describe what is going on with Ohio and hemp," he said. "There's so much excitement - yet there's a little bit of wariness about how it can be utilized and be an additional stream of revenue for farmers that have been struggling financially for the last eight years."
This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.
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By Brian DeVore for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration
Under pewter-colored skies, Alan Bedtka tramps through the snow and past a stand of sorghum-sudangrass, its chest-high stems rattling in the harsh wind. The tall forage stands out in southeastern Minnesota’s corn and soybean fields, which this time of year have been reduced to stubble poking through the snow.
Bedtka is in his mid-30s and working to raising a small cow-calf beef herd profitably. That requires cutting costs and labor, and he’d like to keep input-intensive corn and soy out of the picture if he can. Instead, he wants his cattle to harvest their own feed via managed rotational grazing, even in the winter.
“Any day you can graze is better,” says Bedka.
It turns out a system that relies less on row crops isn’t just good for a time- and resource-strapped young farmer. A snowball’s toss away, a trout stream called Crow Spring snakes through the white landscape. Yet the bucolic scene belies an environmental problem roiling beneath the surface: The groundwater in this part of Minnesota is so contaminated with nitrates running off farm fields that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently called on three state agencies to take action to protect the health of rural residents.
That’s where the sorghum-sudangrass comes in. It works as both a cover crop and forage for the cattle, and it’s helping Bedtka build up organic matter in his soil. He was paid to plant it by the Olmsted County Groundwater Protection and Soil Health Program, a local effort that seeks to reduce overall fertilizer use by building soil—therefore cutting down on the nutrients that enter waterways—while helping farmers save money.
In its inaugural season, the program has already helped keep tens of thousands of pounds of nitrates out of area water. The initiative goes beyond pushing the establishment of an isolated practice to take a holistic, integrative approach. And its early success has conservationists and lawmakers hoping it can become a model for local, state, and federal farm conservation programs, and in the process serve as a way of disrupting the corn-bean-feedlot machine that dominates Midwestern agriculture.
Nipping Nitrates at the Source
In 2022, Olmsted County commissioners Mark Thein and Gregg Wright approached staffers in the local soil and water conservation district office and asked a seemingly straightforward question: How can we keep nitrates out of the groundwater? Thein, whose family runs a well drilling business, is troubled by the increase in contamination he’s seen over the past few decades in the aquifers he taps throughout southeastern Minnesota.
“It’s not in society’s best interest to look the other way,” he says. “I don’t think it’s fair to the next generation.”
Southeastern Minnesota is a hollow land—its geology is characterized by porous limestone that allows contaminants to easily make their way into underground aquifers. Nitrates are a particularly troublesome pollutant, given their ability to escape the surface and seep deeper into the Earth, often in a mysterious and unpredictable manner. High nitrate levels can cause a sometimes-fatal condition called “blue baby syndrome” and has been linked to colorectal cancer, thyroid disease, and neural tube defects.
The EPA has set the drinking water standard for nitrate at 10 milligrams per liter, or 10 parts per million. Recently, research has hinted at serious health problems associated with nitrate levels lower than that. Minnesota Department of Agriculture testing has shown that over 12 percent of the private wells tested in the eight-county karst region of southeastern Minnesota exceeded the EPA’s drinking water standard. More than 9,000 residents in the region have been or still are at risk of consuming water at or above the EPA standard, according to a letter the agency released in November 2023.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency says 70 percent of the state’s nitrate pollution is coming from cropland. Corn requires lots of nitrogen, and it’s by far the most commonly used fertilizer in the United States. Iowa farmers, for example, apply it on 87 percent of their fields at a rate of 149 pounds per acre. Annual crops take up only about half of the nitrogen applied, and the rest often ends up polluting groundwater in the form of nitrate.
This doesn’t just create problems in local drinking water wells. Nitrogen and phosphorus escaping Midwestern farm fields are the major cause of the hypoxic “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, which is about the size of Yellowstone National Park. The EPA’s latest National Rivers and Streams Assessment found close to half of the country’s waterways were in “poor condition,” and nutrients such as nitrogen are a leading culprit.
Southeastern Minnesota’s Olmsted County is a microcosm of agriculture’s dependence on nitrogen fertilizer. Since the 1940s, oats, wheat, hay, and pasture have been replaced by a duoculture of corn and soybeans. In addition, large concentrated animal feeding operations, which have become more prevalent there in recent years, add to the problem by disposing millions of gallons of nitrogen-rich liquid manure.
Olmsted County officials acknowledge that water in certain areas of the county will continue to see increasing nitrate levels as the contaminant moves deeper into aquifers. And when nitrates are present, it’s inevitable that other contaminants, such as pesticides, are also polluting the water. “We’re allowing this to happen,” says Caitlin Meyer, the water resources coordinator for the Olmsted SWCD. “But what can we do to prevent this in the first place?”
Dialing up Diversity
One standard approach to cleaning the water that runs off farms is planting cover crops. Indeed, studies have shown that when cover crops grow between the corn and soy seasons, they provide the kind of soil environment that builds natural fertility and cuts nitrate leaching by anywhere from 40 to over 70 percent.
Cover cropping has also gained a reputation as a tool for sequestering carbon and thus mitigating climate change. Since 2016, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has made available more than $100 million in funds to help farmers establish cover crops.
Despite the resources devoted to advancing the practice, however, only around 5 percent of U.S. farmland is regularly cover cropped. The cost can be prohibitive, and it can be tricky to fit them into a conventional row-cropping system. A 2022 Stanford University satellite study reported that although cover cropping reduces erosion and improves water quality, it also causes significant yield hits for corn and soybeans. And some scientists are concerned that cover cropping’s role in climate change mitigation has been overplayed.
For a time, the Olmsted County SWCD administered a traditional cover-crop program funded by the USDA that helped farmers with establishment costs. Angela White, a soil conservation technician for the SWCD, says the program was valuable in getting cover crops established in the region and showing that it could work, but it had limitations as far as producing environmental benefits. Farmers would often plow the cover under early in the spring before it could provide optimal soil health benefits, and USDA restrictions didn’t allow much flexibility.
Ray Weil, a University of Maryland soil ecologist who has worked with farmers in numerous states, says when farmers are paid to implement an isolated practice such as cover cropping, they can become too focused on the minimum needed to qualify for payments, and they don’t consider the overall soil health picture.
But Weil and other experts also say cover cropping can be a “gateway practice” for implementing the five principles of soil health promoted by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service or NRCS: armor the soil, minimize disturbance (i.e., reduce tillage), increase plant diversity, keep roots in the soil as long as possible, and integrate livestock.
Plant diversity and covering the land has long been associated with more resilient soil. But experts say the integration of livestock via rotational grazing can also help reduce reliance on continuous plantings of fertilizer-intensive crops. And that’s where the Olmsted County Groundwater Protection and Soil Health Program enters the picture. The program pays farmers to plant cover crops, but it digs deeper to ensure that they get real results.
Research shows that allowing cover crops to grow to significant heights can dramatically reduce pollution. So, the program pays a farmer $55 an acre to grow their cover crops to at least 12 inches; at 24 inches, they receive an additional $20 per acre. Planting a cash crop within a living stand of cover crops, a technique called “planting green,” garners a farmer an additional $10 an acre. Farmers can also receive payments for growing so-called “alternative” crops such as oats and other small grains, and for converting crop acres to deep-rooted perennial systems like hay and pasture.
Each farm can qualify for a maximum of around $15,000 in payments per year. When Olmsted County SWCD staffers originally brainstormed with area farmers about setting up the soil health initiative, they considered a per-farm cap of $20,000 to $25,000. However, the farmers insisted on a lower cap so that more money could be spread around on more acres.
“I put $6,500 total expenses into seeding—the program paid back $3,500,” says farmer Logan Clark, who used the program to convert cropland to rotationally grazed pasture on his hilly, erosion-prone farm. “So, I’d at least be $3,500 more in the hole if I didn’t have the program.”
SWCD staffers say one advantage of the program is that because funding comes from the county—the commissioners agreed to set aside $5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for the program—rather than the USDA, they have more freedom to allow farmers to experiment and learn from their mistakes.
Mark Stokes has been using no-till cropping for 26 years. Around five years ago, he noticed that even on his no-till acres he was seeing erosion, so he started growing cover crops utilizing traditional cost-share programs. He isn’t afraid to experiment—he’s grazed his beef cow herd on a mix of nine cover crops, and a few years ago, after seeing it being done on YouTube, mounted a seeder box on his combine so he can plant cover crops while he’s harvesting corn.
Stokes enrolled in the Olmsted SWCD program in 2023 to help cover the risk of yet another innovative practice. Through the contract, he agreed to plant his corn and soybeans into growing cereal rye green and terminate the rye after it hit 12 inches tall. It turns out the dry conditions made it a bad year to let a cover crop grow tall. On the other hand, the oats he raised in 2023 thrived.
When it came time to sign up for the 2024 round of the program, Stokes took advantage of its flexibility. “I signed up for more oats, so we don’t have to worry about the cereal rye so much, and if we have to, we can terminate it sooner.”
Not all participants in the program are going to check all five soil health principle boxes, but flexibility can serve as a seedbed for aspirational farming. Alan Bedtka wants to follow as many of the principles as possible. In 2023, he used the program’s funds to grow his cover crop to 12 inches. He also signed up to raise cover crops for seed production, which qualified him for the alternative crop portion of the initiative. Finally, his use of rotational grazing and the growing of forages on formerly row-cropped land qualified him for the haying and grazing payment.
“Protecting water quality is a perk, but the main reason I’m doing it is to try to be more profitable,” says Bedtka as he stands in a recently grazed cover-cropped field that he hasn’t had to add fertilizer to for two years. Nearby is an exposed limestone hillside, a reminder of the area’s vulnerable karst. Bedtka explains that his healthier soil absorbs and stores precipitation better. “So that means you’re growing more grass and more cows per acre. All the benefits are kind of tied up into one.”
Like Stokes, Bedtka is now able to take a more integrative, whole-systems approach with less financial risk.
“I know farmers who have been cover cropping or strip tilling for decades . . . Now they are hungry for what’s next,” says Kristi Pursell, who, when she headed up the watershed group Clean River Partners, supported farmers adopting practices to keep ag pollution out of southeastern Minnesota’s Cannon River. “The Olmsted SWCD program respects the knowledge that these farmers have of their land and their previous experience.”
Truckloads of Disruption
Soon after the Olmsted County program was launched as a pilot in 2022, 52 farmers signed up to grow tall cover crops—more than double what was expected. In total, they agreed to grow cover crops up to 12 inches high on over 5,300 acres and 24 inches on 2,700 acres. This year, over 70 farmers have signed up to raise cover crops under the program, representing almost 13,000 acres.
There are 240,000 acres of cropland in the county, so the majority of the area’s farmers aren’t participating in this initiative. But the program may be having an outsized impact on soil health. The SWCD estimates the environmental results of the program by combining the nitrate reduction directly observed on its own research farm with some of the wider research that’s been done. It estimates that in 2023, the program kept roughly 310,000 pounds of nitrates out of the county’s drinking water.
Surveys show that most farmers plant more cover-crop acres than they are getting paid for— something they can afford to do because the SWCD contracts pay so well, says Martin Larsen, a farmer and conservation technician for the district. When the SWCD includes those additional acres, the amount of nitrates being kept out of the water goes up to 560,000 pounds—or the equivalent of 23 semi-truckloads of urea fertilizer.
“The contracts are generating a nearly two-to-one payback in terms of soil health practices that are put in place on the farms,” says Larsen.
At the SWCD office, Caitlin Meyer, the water resources coordinator, points to a color-coded map that shows where farmers have signed up for the program so far; soil-friendly practices are being used in most areas of the county. “If we could get 30 percent in our subwatersheds put into cover crops, we’d be making real progress,” she says. One estimate is that some watersheds are approaching the 20-percent mark.
Larsen, who got his start using regenerative practices by planting cover crops a few years ago, then displays a chart showing what kind of acreage changes could occur if the program lives up to its potential over the next five years—9 percent less corn, 13 percent fewer soybeans, 417 percent more cover crops, 95 percent more oats, and 5 percent more pasture. If the effort succeeds, in other words, it could significantly disrupt the corn-soybean system in the region.
It might also serve as a model in other counties in Minnesota and beyond. Dagoberto Driggs, who coordinates the National Healthy Soils Policy Network, says the data from the Olmsted effort’s research farm helps determine an accurate estimate of the program’s benefits, ensuring public resources are being invested wisely. He adds that a program like this fits well with the current push on the part of regenerative agriculture groups across the country to create conservation incentives that are flexible enough to allow farmers to innovate and adapt. Driggs would like to see something like the Olmsted County program tried in other parts of the country.
“We really need a more holistic approach based on the soil health principles, which is what I find striking with this program,” says Driggs.
Mark Thein, the well-driller and county commissioner, hopes a cost-benefit analysis could show that such a proactive program saves taxpayer money by reducing the need for new drinking water infrastructure to deal with pollutants. It would be ideal, he adds, if the state would create a large-scale version of the program, taking pressure off local governments.
The timing could work in his favor. An analysis by the Star Tribune newspaper found that despite the fact that Minnesota has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce nitrate pollution over the past few decades, the problem has not gone away.
When the 2024 session of the Minnesota Legislature convened in February, lawmakers began drafting legislation that would create a pilot nitrate-reduction program modeled after the Olmsted County initiative. Pursell, who is now a state representative, is working on the legislation. She’s frustrated with the lack of progress made to reduce ag pollution and blames federal policy such as the farm bill, which encourages farmers to grow little other than corn and soybeans.
If a local pilot is successful, Pursell says it could help farmers transition out of the corn-soybean duoculture in a financially viable manner—and give taxpayers a return on their investment in the form of clean water, a crucial public good.
“I want to make sure that when we are spending money, it’s for an outcome, and it’s not just to tick a box,” she says. “For generations we’ve been telling farmers to do exactly what they’re doing. If we want them to change, we need to change.”
Brian DeVore wrote this article for Civil Eats.
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