This summer marks the third year that Kansans have grown hemp for industrial uses.
Yet growing the less sexy cousin of the plant associated with getting high and some medicinal uses has proven riskier and more difficult than many farmers initially expected.
Consequently, the number of licenses issued this year is less than half of what the state saw in 2020.
“There were some misconceptions about the ease of marketability of it,” said Braden Hoch, the state’s industrial hemp program supervisor.
The risk of any agricultural operation is compounded by an ever-changing set of state and federal rules. And now some hemp farmers and processors want more help from the government to reduce risk and encourage innovation.
Shining Star Hemp Co. is one of only 11 licensed hemp processors in the state.
Outside of the industrial building near the Pratt municipal airport in south-central Kansas where Shining Star operates sits rows of 1,200 pound bags full of industrial hemp stalks, grains and flowers.
Inside, workers break open the bags and dump them onto a large conveyor belt leading to a cacophony of machinery shaking, blowing and sifting the biomass into its usable parts.
The operation is one of the few successful outfits in the state.
“It’s been a lot of work, a lot of phone calls developing relationships and finding synergies,” Jennifer Holmes, who works with Shining Star to develop and market products said. “But honestly, I can say at this point, we’re doing awesome for where we’re at.”
Paul McGeary masterminded Shining Star’s system for converting the hemp harvest into something industry can use.
“It’s about, probably, 30 years of beating your head against the wall, mostly,” he said.
McGeary is a contractor for Shining Star. He’s worked in the agricultural processing world for most of his life and has applied what he learned over decades of sifting wheat and corn to develop this machine to sift hemp.
He said the complexity of the process is part of what’s holding the industry back. It just doesn’t have the scale to supply manufacturers who would put the fiber to use.
“We were walking into those meetings thinking that to have 30-to- 40,000 pounds on hand is something. But when you walk into industry and they want five train cars a day or a trainload a week, we just aren’t prepared for that,” he said. “And getting them to wait until we’re prepared, that’s the bottleneck of the whole thing.”
Hemp has been hyped as something with a wide range of industrial uses. The stalk can be made into paper or biodegradable plastics. The seeds can be made into food. And the flowers can be pressed to extract oils.
