Lancaster Farming newspaper editors talk to farmers and experts about industrial hemp.
This week, the Hemp Show takes place in New York City, at the intersection of Industrial Hemp and Fashion Avenue.
Last month, the National Industrial Hemp Council held its annual Global Industrial Hemp Fiber Summit at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. With two full days of presentations, panel discussions and networking opportunities, the "Seed to Style" summit attracted people from all parts of the hemp supply chain, as well as people from the worlds of fashion, design and global textiles.
This episode offers a snapshot of what the intersection of hemp and fashion looks like in 2026. We talk to Shannon Mayer, dean of the Jay and Patty Baker School of Business and Technology at FIT; Patrick Atagi, president and CEO of the National Industrial Hemp Council; and Curie Chang, founder and CEO of Ofibera, a luxury hemp apparel company.
National Industrial Hemp Council of America
NIHC Global Summit
FIT's Jay and Patty Baker School of Business and Technology
https://www.fitnyc.edu/academics/academic-divisions/business-and-technology/index.php
Ofibera
Bonus: NIHC Industrial Hemp Annual Market Guide
https://nihcoa.com/new-nihc-industrial-hemp-market-guide-now-available-online/
The NIHC's first annual guide to U.S. hemp production and markets, which debuted in print on hemp paper at the Seed to Style summit at FIT, is now available online.
ONE PLANT in Lancaster
https://www.oneplant.film/lancaster
Tickets: ONE PLANT double screening, Oct. 24, Zoetropolis Cinema Stillhouse
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lancaster-farming-sunflower-present-one-plant-tickets-1998324956739
Jungmaven
IND HEMP
Americhanvre Cast-Hemp
King's AgriSeeds
Forever Green, distributors of the KP4 Hemp Cutter
New West Genetics has been focused on crop improvement in the hemp industry since 2014.
In July of 2021, the Lancaster Farming National Hemp Tour paid a visit to the New West headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado, where Wendy Mosher sat down for an interview with the host of the Lancaster Farming podcast, Eric Hurlock. That's me. It's sort of weird to talk about myself in the third person, but anyway, on this week's show we catch up with Mosher to hear about the past five years.
Back in 2021, Mosher spoke about new hybrid varieties of hemp grain that could double yields. And now five years later, that hybrid is in the middle of a market that wasn't on her radar back in 2021: renewable fuels. The oil from hemp grain makes an excellent biofuel, she said.
We also talk about her work with the Hemp Feed Coalition, a group dedicated to opening the livestock feed markets for hemp.
Our conversation was recorded in August before the McConnell deadline was extended to December. She welcomes closing the loopholes in the regulations.
"Bad actors still, to this day, impact my company. So I want them out of there. And it's their own fault if there's a huge backlash. It's their fault for not taking care of that in their industry," she said.
It's a fun conversation, so listen up and climb on board the RV Time Machine.
New West Genetics
newwestgenetics.com/
Hemp Feed Coalition
hempfeedcoalition.org/
ONE PLANT Lancaster Screening, Oct 24
oneplant.film/lancaster
Get Tickets — ONE PLANT in Lancaster
eventbrite.com
Jungmaven — hemp clothing, made in the USA
IND Hemp — Fort Benton, Montana
Forever Green, distributors of the KP4 Hemp Cutter
hempcutter.com
This week on the Hemp Show, we're revisiting some of the folks we met during our National Hemp Tour of 2021.
Five years ago this summer the Industrial Hemp Podcast hit the road to map the industry as it was then. Hemp farmers, processors and manufacturers were few and far between at the time.
One of the stops we made in the summer of 2021 was South Bend Industrial Hemp near Great Bend, Kansas, where Melissa Nelson, her husband Aaron Baldwin, and brother-in-law Rich Baldwin had recently installed a decortication machine that processed raw hemp bales into usable streams of fiber and hurd.
Melissa's vision for growth has always been about building a resilient regional supply chain. South Bend Industrial Hemp developed a growers group with the intention of educating local farmers to grow the crop.
Five years later, the team at South Bend works with a group of 27 growers across Kansas, producing around 7,000 acres of hemp this season.
"Our farmers are everything," Nelson said. "At the end of the day, we couldn't do this without them. And the responsibility that we feel because of the trust that they put in us is immeasurable. I carry that weight very heavily on my shoulders and it's very important to me that they have success."
Listen to the whole show to hear how South Bend has grown over the past five years — the challenges, the successes, the learning curves and much more.
South Bend Industrial Hemp
Lancaster Farming
Jungmaven
IND Hemp
Forever Green / KP4 Hemp Cutter
Kings Agriseeds
This week's Hemp Podcast is divided into two parts.
First, we take a look at the recent changes in U.S. hemp policy in a conversation with Rachel Umansky-Castro, the agriculture reporter for Bloomberg Government, who has spent the summer covering the fight over the federal definition of hemp. She walks us through what's been happening in D.C. lately, who the various lobbying groups are and what they ultimately want from federal policy.
"There are so many divisions among these lawmakers, and it's clear that the hemp issue has split members of the same party, " Umansky-Castro said.
Last week, Congress used a continuing resolution to push the so-called Mitch McConnell deadline from November to December 11, and Umansky-Castro explains what that extra month does and doesn't buy the industry.
In part two of the show, we check in with Tennessee filmmaker Jordan Berger, whose documentary, "One Plant," is finally finished after several years of production.
"The plant itself, you know, it touches on everything. And this thing started as a series because there's just so much, but we ultimately made it one film," Berger said.
One Plant premieres at the Nashville Film Festival on September 26, 2026. From there, the film travels around the country to other festivals, with stops in Bozeman, MT; Santa Cruz, CA; and Minneapolis, MN.
On October 24, the Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast will host a double screening of One Plant in Lancaster, PA, at the Zoetropolis Theatre with a Q&A and time to meet others from the film and the Pennsylvania hemp community. Doors open at 11:30 a.m., tickets are available on Eventbrite at the link below.
Get Tickets — ONE PLANT in Lancaster
ONE PLANT Lancaster Screening, Oct 24
Bloomberg Government
news.bgov.com/
Rachel Umansky-Castro — Bloomberg Government
news.bgov.com/author/rachel-umansky-castro-25432161
Hemp Ban Delay Passed by Congress After Blowback From Hardliners
Nashville Film Festival — World Premiere, Sept 26
nashvillefilmfestival.org/2026-festival
Bozeman Film Festival — Oct 10
Santa Cruz Film Festival — Oct 17
NIHC Global Summit — "Seed to Style," FIT, NYC
Choose Your Change — Farm to Fabric Hemp Textile Symposium
Jungmaven — hemp clothing, made in the USA
IND Hemp — Fort Benton, Montana
This week on the Industrial Hemp Podcast, we talk to Patrick Atagi, president and CEO of the National Industrial Hemp Council, the organization that's hosting the Seed to Style hemp fiber summit in conjunction with the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, Sept. 16-18.
This event is a continuation of the conversations NIHC facilitated in Raleigh, N.C., last summer when they held their fiber summit at N.C. State's Wilson College of Textiles.
But this year, the stakes are a little higher and the energy burns a little brighter. Because that's what New York City does: It amplifies everything.
"It's building materials, it's clothing — the different parts and pieces of hemp all together, making it all work together. And the culmination is a fashion exhibit," Atagi said.
The fashion exhibit caps the summit on Thursday evening — hemp coming off the field and onto the mannequin, the "seed to style" idea made real.
Also, one big nugget of hemp news this week: Congress has hit the snooze button on the McConnell deadline that threatens to shut down the vast majority of the cannabinoid hemp industry. Intoxicating hemp products are still out, but the industry has an extra month to fight for its future. The clock is still ticking, but now the alarm is set for Dec. 11, 2026.
NIHC Global Hemp Summit
Summit Sessions
nihcglobalsummit.com/sessions/
The Goodness of Hemp Act
Cornell Hemp
Jungmaven
IND HEMP
Kings AgriSeeds
Forever Green
This week on The Hemp Show, we check in with Greg Wilson from Hempwood in Murray, Kentucky where, five years ago, Lancaster Farming's National Hemp Tour made its first stop.
A lot has happened with Hempwood since then, and on this episode, Wilson brings us up to speed.
In many ways, this show is a counting of the blessings — a list of what Wilson and his team have accomplished over the past half decade.
We discuss new factories, new products and award-winning installations in the Bowling Green public schools that are changing the quality of education through natural building materials for generations of Kentucky schoolchildren.
HempWood
Bowling Green Daily News
bgdailynews.com/2026/08/11/students-returning-to-school-amid-numerous-projects/
Cornell Hemp
Ursa Alta from Condor Seed
condorseed.com/seeds/industrial-hemp/hemp-ursa-alta/
Murray State University – Center for Agricultural Hemp
Land Between the Lakes
Floor Covering News
fcnews.net/2026/07/flooring-sustainability-summit-honors-2026-award-winners/
Jungmaven
IND HEMP
Americhanvre
Forever Green
This week on the hemp podcast we take a ride in the RV Time Machine. We're going back five years, back to the National Hemp Tour in the summer of 2021, when we took the podcast on the road — and took my family too.
We traveled over ten thousand miles from coast to coast in a rented RV visiting hemp farms, processors and manufacturers across the country.
The industry was sparse then and these hemp companies were few and far between in 2021.
And keep in mind that in 2021, most of the noise around industrial hemp was actually about CBD flower and canabinoid production.
What made our trip different was that we were talking to the people on the fiber and grain side of the industry, where the game-changing potential of this plant is strongest.
Think houses, textiles, food and fuel. Think row crops, think big acreage, think about a third crop in with our beloved corn and soy. Think Hemp, big, boring and ubiquitous.
But it has to start somewhere. People have to start doing things to make it happen. So in 2021, I set out to meet the people where they were. I went to see the farms, see the fields and see the factories. I wanted to meet the people, hear their dreams and see their visions come to life.
And now five years later, with gas prices approaching 5 dollars a gallon, we go back on the road again, but this time we go virtually.
Over the next few months, I will be sharing new conversations from the people I met on the road back then. We'll hear what's changed, what's stayed the same and what the industry looks like now.
But before we start publishing those episodes, we're going to go back in time and revisit the tour itself. This episode is your atlas for our time travel. Buckle up, buttercup, and we'll see you in 2021.
IND HEMP
Condor Seeds
Forever Green
On this week's show, we catch up with Lancaster County farmer, hemp innovator and cover-crop coach Steve Groff to hear about the progress on two machines that have been years in the making and, he thinks, are finally about ready.
The headliner is the Fiber King in-field decorticator, a project Groff has been developing with Larry Serbin of Hemp Traders. Instead of hauling bulky raw stalks off the field, the machine decorticates the hemp right where it grows: the fiber is laid on the ground to dry for a couple of days and then round-baled while the wet hurd drops into a standard forage wagon.
Groff calls it a systems approach. They're ready to build the first commercial unit and are testing at universities, but they're waiting on investor funding to get there.
The economics are the whole point. Hemp is expensive to move as raw biomass — you just can't get enough weight on a truck — so decorticating in the field adds value for the farmer and lowers transportation costs as the crop gets denser. "You want to give the farmer as much profit as possible," Groff said.
We also talked about his four-inch precision no-till hemp planter, developed through a Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture innovation grant. By singulating seed and placing it on even four-inch spacing, the planter aims for the uniform, pencil- to Sharpie-sized stalks that textile buyers want, Groff said.
Steve Groff
Hemp Traders
One Plant Documentary World Premiere — Nashville Film Festival
Nashville, TN Sept. 26
nashfilmfest2026.eventive.org/schedule/one-plant-6a729213e47b192d0a91b154
Hemp Lava Love Workshop
Tucson, AZ Oct. 13–15
One Plant Documentary Screening
Lancaster, PA Oct. 24
eventbrite.com/e/lancaster-farming-sunflower-present-one-plant-tickets-1998324956739
Americhanvre
IND Hemp
Forever Green
This week on the Hemp Show we're digging into a few of the calendar items we mentioned on last week's show, specifically the run of events in New York state next month.
On September 15, Cornell's 10th Annual Grain and Fiber Hemp Field Day comes to the Cornell AgriTech campus in Geneva. The field day will feature a John Deere combine demonstration that will include harvesting grain, drying the grain and putting the fiber harvest on display — baling it, decorticating it and splitting it into bast and hurds.
Register here: https://cals.cornell.edu/events/2026-cornell-grain-fiber-hemp-field-day
Then, September 16–18, the National Industrial Hemp Council will hold its Global Industrial Hemp Fiber Summit at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The theme is "Seed to Style." Two days of programming will open with a keynote from NIHC president Patrick Atagi before moving through sessions on reaching the sustainable consumer with the Bezos Earth Fund, hemp biocomposites and bioplastics with Cameron McIntosh of Americhanvre and Greg Wilson of HempWood, USDA research and natural-fiber partnerships across flax, cotton and hemp.
Register here: https://nihcglobalsummit.com/
Day two of the event runs from field to fiber through equipment and processing, Latin American fiber opportunities and an international industry panel. The event will closes with "Back to the Future: Bringing Hemp Back to the Textile Mainstream," featuring Maciej Kowalski of Kombinat Konopny and "Concept to Catwalk," a look at hemp luxury moderated by Farm to Fabric's own Jen Adams. The event will be capped by an evening reception and fashion showcase.
And that all leads up to Farm to Fabric, a hemp textile symposium running September 18-20 at the Brooklyn Peace Center and on Governor's Island as part of New York Textile Month. It's a free event, open to the public, with NIHC as the title sponsor.
On September 18-19, the Brooklyn Peace Center feature a pop-up hemp store, a technology and digital creation room, and the Farm to Fabric Experience, where members of the Tuscarora tribe will show the historical process of pulling fiber from the stalk and turning it into yarn. On September 20, the event will continue on Governor's Island for the Julian Magazine release and a fashion presentation.
This episode features a conversation with Jen Adams, organizer of the hemp fashion event in Brooklyn, who said her organization, Choose Your Change, "chose industrial hemp as a subject matter to show the breadth of what we do as an organization, but also to try to elevate and get the stories and voices in the hemp industry."
Register here: https://www.fluidforms.co/f/cyc
All this and more on this week's show, including a news nugget/calendar item about The Hemp Feed Coalition's upcoming webinar on August 20, a free session on Canada's hemp seed meal feed ingredient application.
Register for the webinar here: https://hempfeedcoalition.org/webinar-series/
USDA Germplasm Bonus Event
After we made the audio for this episode, we received an email from Zach Stansell, the USDA hemp germplasm curator to invite me to the USDA Hemp Stakeholder Engagement Event on September 10 at Cornell AgriTech's Jordan Hall in Geneva — five days ahead of the Field Day. It's free, no registration, in person or online, with a full day of USDA-ARS talks and a stakeholder roundtable on the future of hemp research. If you're headed to Geneva, get there early.
Learn more here: https://hemp.cals.cornell.edu/2026/08/05/usda-hemp-stakeholder-engagement-event-september-10/
Americhanvre Cast Hemp
IND Hemp
Forever Green — KP4 Hemp Cutter
On this week's Hemp Show we are focusing on recent news stories and upcoming hemp events, including the Farm-to-Fabric Hemp Textile Symposium in New York City, September 18-20. See the full list of events below.
Plus a healthy helping of Hemp News Nuggets from HempToday.net:
Ireland confronts hemp bottlenecks as Parliament weighs reforms to restart industry
hemptoday.net/ireland-confronts-hemp-bottlenecks-as-parliament-weighs-reforms-to-restart-industry/
Botswana clears path to commercial hemp production after successful government trials
hemptoday.net/botswana-clears-path-to-commercial-hemp-production-after-successful-government-trials/
Proposed EU carbon market update could boost business case for hemp starting in 2030
hemptoday.net/proposed-eu-carbon-market-update-could-boost-business-case-for-hemp-starting-in-2030/
South Korea puts $21 million behind minor cannabinoids for medical hemp products
hemptoday.net/south-korea-puts-21-million-behind-minor-cannabinoids-for-medical-hemp-products/
'Australia has the potential to become world leader' if government will support hemp
hemptoday.net/australia-has-the-potential-to-become-world-leader-if-government-will-support-hemp/
Discover NC Textile Hemp — Raleigh, NC, August 6–7
discovernctextilehemp.textiles.ncsu.edu/
HempBLOCK USA Training — Alma, CO, August 7–9
us.hempblockinternational.com/installer-training/
Fibre for Our Future: Unlocking Hemp & Flax — Cobden, ON, August 13
Cornell Fiber & Grain Hemp Field Day — Geneva, NY, September 15
cals.cornell.edu/cornell-agritech
NIHC Global Industrial Hemp Fiber Summit — New York, NY (FIT), September 16–18
Farm to Fabric Hemp Textile Symposium — Brooklyn / Governors Island, NY, September 18–20
Southern Illinois Hemp Symposium — Carbondale, IL, September 18
conferenceservices.siu.edu/conferences/southern-illinois-hemp-symposium.php
Condor Seed
IND Hemp
The Goodness of Hemp
Kings AgriSeeds