Hemp: Virtual Session Lays Bare Technology Wins, Challenges
June 18, 2020 
The first major hemp event to go virtual due to the coronavirus, this week’s “Experience Hemp: Summer Solstice” Virtual Conference and Trade Show wrapped up a full slate of online presentations and virtual booth visits.
Earlier in the week, the virtual conference kicked off a week of industrial hemp industry content with Tuesday’s tech-focused panel discussion, “Technology Advances Across the Hemp Supply Chain.” The conversation was moderated by longtime hemp industry advocate Joy Beckerman and featured a wide cast of characters.
Before digging into the tech nuts and bolts, it’s important to note a common theme that panelists wanted to be sure was imparted upon attendees. It’s a mantra you’ve likely heard before if you’ve been paying attention to the hemp industry for the last few months.
“Please, please, please, I cannot say this enough: Do not plant hemp this season if you do not have a harvesting plan and contract with a processing facility in place,” urged Mark Reiners, the CEO of Holland-based HempFlax, a vertically integrated hemp product formulator that advocates full plant utilization. “The total crop valuation only pays off if you are in an area where the entire infrastructure is in place. And please do not forget about markets – who is buying the CBD, who is buying the fiber? Do not plant ANY seeds without a solid plan, because you will lose money, there is little doubt.”
Drones in Hemp? Yeah, that’s Happening
As someone who has flown drones both as a hobby and as a commercial activity since 2014, I was pretty stoked to hear that drone usage in hemp cultivation (field grown, obviously) is starting to take off with a couple of the panel members.
Reiners’ group at HempFlax in The Netherlands is deploying the flying robots in the traditional agronomic method, using cameras and spectral sensors attached to the drones to fly fields, capturing real-time field conditions from overhead, and then matching those stitched together images of the fields to yield maps created in the group’s John Deere combines to variable rate fertilizer applications based on yield zones delineated in the field.
Andrew Bish, the COO of Bish Enterprises, a multistate operator and custom hemp equipment design firm, is doing some drone application work in hemp and finding it’s really a fantastic fit for both crop and technology.
“That’s probably one of our more exciting products we offer in cultivation, our drone service. We’re really excited about that one,” Bish explained. “With one drone we can do about 14 to 20 acres of spraying in a day, and we’re finding it’s really a nice fit for applying near fence lines or in hard to reach areas.”
Bish adds that the spray drones can apply either OMRI-certified materials, or conventional crop protection products that are labeled for use in hemp cultivation, and the real value for farmers is in the reduced compaction achieved (e.g., soil health) by keeping a heavy tractor or application rig out of the field.
Blockchain Will Be Crucial Going Forward
TagOne’s VP of Ecosystems and Partnerships, Joe Witte, discussed what his group is doing in leveraging blockchain technology throughout all levels of the hemp cultivation and distribution chain.
“When you create data and you push it to the blockchain, that data is assigned a 200-character alpha-numeric hash, and if anything changes in that data as it moves through the product life cycle chain, even the most miniscule change is recorded , tracked, and documented,” Witte explained.
The lowest hanging fruit where blockchain can be applied immediately and practically in hemp is in tracking the various certificates of analysis (CoAs) that hemp marketers use to market their crops and end-products. In recent years, these documents have increasingly been forged, altered, and even Photo-shopped by bad actors in both the cannabis and hemp industries, to the point that many growers today have little trust in a CoA from a company or group that they do not know or have first-hand experience with.
“Blockchain is complicated; but at the same time, the concept is very simple: You’re capturing and connecting data and making sure that as that data is being transferred from one database or cloud network to the next, it remains viable and certified,” Witte adds. “In its simplest sense, blockchain helps transfer imputable data from one source to another, while ensuring its accuracy.”
Witte’s company, TagOne, is offering cloud-based blockchain solutions that hemp farmers can use to capture and pass on important cultivation data through the process to manufacturing, retail, and distribution. It’s all an effort to ensure the end consumer is confident in how that hemp-based product was grown, processed, and formulated. And it’s not going away anytime soon.
“Technology-enabled traceability is part of our future – to be honest, it’s not really even the future anymore, it’s already here,” Witte said. “The companies that embrace transparency that includes robust track and trace capabilities will be the ones who win.
“If I can leave you with four words to remember this presentation by, it’s ‘How will they know?’,” he added. “How will they know how you processed that CBG? How will they know the CoA is real? It’s important that we as an industry think about these processes and start to embrace modern technologies like cloud data storage, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.”
What’s Holding Hemp Cultivation Technology Back?
Talk to most any hemp grower, and inevitably the conversation will likely at some point turn to the lack of integrated harvesting technology in hemp cultivation, and how that affects a grower’s bottom line in a crop segment that currently buries growers in harvest labor costs that are on average anywhere between $4,000 to $15,000 per acre.
One of the biggest issues in developing large-scale, commercial grade harvesting equipment in hemp is the fact that the crop is produced across such a wide and diverse array of production settings.
“One of the main challenges here in the U.S. is just figuring out as an industry, ‘What are we trying to do here?’,” Bish explained. “There hasn’t really been a specific direction that we’ve agreed upon going, whether it’s growing it for grain, for fiber, or for CBD and smokable hemp flowers. Or oil extraction. It’s all over the board currently.”
A promising recent development for ag equipment manufacturers, according to Bish, is the trend of many U.S. growers more interested in producing hemp for fiber utilization, even without an established processing infrastructure in place yet.
“We started innovating equipment for the grain and fiber (markets), and then the last couple years all of the interest has been in things like CBD and CBG varieties, and now we’re going back to some of our original products we designed for that fiber market with updates,” Bish said. “Ideally for us, some of these products we design and build will match how the growers want to grow hemp this year, but of course not all of them will because, again, there’s no standardization in how growers grow hemp yet.”
Joe Hickey Sr., the CEO and founder of Kentucky-based cultivation operation Halcyon Holdings, and a longtime hemp farmer, educator, and advocate, is yet another industry expert frustrated by the lack of equipment available to today’s hemp farmer.
“Let’s try to get around and get over this whole chicken and egg thing we’ve had going on for too long, this industry has been going through this since the very beginning,” Hickey Sr. said. “The stuff that has been developed so far has not really worked; any new technology that saves a farmer money, increases productivity and increases product quality is something we’ve got to take a long, hard look at, and we’ve got some really innovative stuff we’re looking at (for 2020).”
Bish added that he’s witnessed some promise in outdoor hemp farmers deploying custom double cut header implements to harvest full plants. The machine chops the hemp plant stalk about eight inches from the ground, and the second head strips the biomass material from the stalk to get all of the biomass out of the field. Still, there is much work to be done.
“When it comes to hemp and equipment for 2020, I’ve talked to a lot of different ag equipment companies, and what I would encourage everybody to do is, if you’re looking to purchase equipment this year I’d say it’s time to start talking with someone about doing it,” he explained. “I’m afraid some of us won’t be able to build the required equipment this season if farmers continue to stall too long.
“A lot of decisions are being put off to very late in the growing season, and the consequences to those producers could be very high. Go out and figure out and sort your plan, because we’re seeing a lot of people who have not done that year, and I’m honestly a little concerned for them.”
Subscribe to eNewsletter
