Pa. hemp industry buffeted by lack of framework and controversial new rules
HARRISBURG — When the federal government gave hemp-growing the green light in 2018, Josh Bobbert almost literally bet the farm on the crop, figuring the versatile plant was going to be a moneymaker for himself, his wife, and nine children.
Since then, though, devoting a lot of his 61-acre family farm in Lawrence County to hemp hasn’t generated the revenue he anticipated. Government, Mr. Bobbert and others say, never created the sort of regulations needed for a stable industry built around a hardy plant that is in genetic terms a first cousin to marijuana.
“They never followed up to provide a legal framework and dosages and things like that,” Mr. Bobbert said. “Nobody has set safety limits and standards.”
Next month, the feeling-out process for possibly creating a framework will play out for a few hours in Harrisburg when the Center for Rural Pennsylvania holds a hearing about the hemp industry. One topic sure to get attention is a recent action that government actually did take – language was put into a federal appropriations bill that that some fear could decimate the industry.
There is “frustration in the business community about how this all unfolded, without giving farmers and the business community time to respond,” according to the executive director of the center, Zachary Adams.
After hemp growing became legal in 2018, a vast array of new THC-containing products began to appear with no testing and no regulatory framework. In the words of Republican Sen. Gene Yaw of Lycoming County, what happened in the years after 2018 was that “people found a way to tinker with the plant and raise the THC.”
The result, Mr. Yaw said, was that a federal bill intended to help farmers instead boosted hemp from a $5 billion-a-year industry to a $30 billion industry, with much of the surge coming from new and untested products with significant THC levels. It became a “wild West” with no product regulations, said Mr. Yaw, who is chairman of the Center for Rural Pennsylvania board.'
The just-passed federal law was intended to quash that part of the business, but instead it may quash the whole industry, according to Beaver County hemp grower Kevin Lusky.
“They only needed a scalpel to fix one or two things, but they took a machete and cut everything off,” Mr. Lusky said.
