The coming hemp glut.
According to Vote Hemp,78,000 acres of hemp was harvested in 2018, three times more than in 2017. Much more acreage is being planted for the 2019 crop (just to keep a sense of proportion, US farmers are expected to plant 92 million acres of corn in 2019). Shi Farms in Pueblo, Colorado, where one of the Monsters is being assembled, is a good example of that rapid growth and the obstacles farmers have had to overcome to achieve it.
After receiving its license to grow hemp, the team at Shi Farms planted hemp clones high in CBD in 40,000 square feet of greenhouses for the 2016 crop. Tending and harvesting that many plants requires a lot of work, but finding a reputable lab to process the harvest was perhaps the toughest problem of all, said Drew Ferguson, operations director for Shi Farms. “The biggest challenge was finding a way to extract (the oil) from all this material we had,” he said. “We’d drop this biomass off at labs and never hear back, or it took a long time or the end product was not good enough.”
