Want more hemp bast fiber and hurd for building materials, batteries, lumber, animal bedding or whatever? Then support the grain side of the equation, grow for seed and get the fiber “free.”
Recent USDA data [PDF] reveal that the average yield growing technical (not planting) seed was 779 pounds per acre, and 4,053 pounds when growing for for stalk. Hemp stalk averages 80% the hurd fraction and 20% bast (long fiber).
In terms of value, growing for stalk returns $958 per acre and seed $579 per acre.
Thus, growing for seed gives the farmer $579 per in “free money” compared to just stalk.
Look at it as $958 vs. $1,536 per acre income by growing for seed instead of just stalk.
What to do with all that seed? For starters, it could power a new “Made In America” product replacement strategy by replacing millions of pounds of foreign hempseed food with domestic.
Food from the hemp grain already has millions of consumers, thousands of retailers, and the most sales and profit of any of the 100% legal hemp industries. It’s long been 90% of Canadian hemp, tens of thousands of acres.
Every grocery store in the nation has it on its shelves, including Costco and Walmart. You see it as shelled hempseed or oil or protein powder or cereal or bread or bars or meat and dairy alternatives or dozens of other foods.
Setting up a seed processing factory is the logical next step for hemp to succeed in America, perhaps that’s why USDA is so slow to move on it? Sell consumer and industrial branded and private-label foods, it should be easy to replace the seed on the shelves coming in from Canada and China.
And any excess or substandard grain could be used in the animal feed market, for CAFOs. There are also many non-food/feed uses for the seed, from emerging bioactives to industrial applications to fuel.
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