Fran Summerlin held in her hand an eight-inch tall hemp plant with a one-inch root ball. She admired it for a moment before planting it in a freshly plowed row in the middle of a former pasture on the east side of Chandler Mountain between Birmingham and Gadsden.
“My daddy would be proud,” she said. Rows of hemp were planted on a five-acre plot on the land her father bought back in 1977, just after Summerlin graduated with a forestry degree from the University of the South. She moved here in 1979.
The grave of an old mare, marked with a wooden cross, overlooks the hemp field. “It’s been my horse farm,” she said.
One of her business partners, Ed Glaze, walked up alongside her. “This is historic,” he said.
Summerlin and Glaze, and dozens of farmers across Alabama, are planting the state’s first legal hemp crop since 1937. Throughout the month of May, as early as the first week of May in Geneva County, Alabama farmers have been planting as part of the state’s Industrial Hemp Research Pilot Program.
After several hours of labor with a crew of 10 on a Saturday morning last month in the valley below Chandler Mountain, about 2,000 plants, ranging from four to eight inches tall, stood in the furrows. Summerlin and Glaze had brought the plants back from a hemp farm in Tennessee the week before. It’ll take three months for the crop to mature. “These particular ones will get five to seven feet tall,” Glaze said.
In December, Summerlin was taking drum lessons in Gadsden from Glaze, who was once a percussionist for the glam-rock band, the Sugar La-Las, an eighties fixture in Birmingham’s music scene. Summerlin had heard about the passage of the new federal farm bill that would allow growing hemp. They were ready to rock.
“I said, ‘Ed, this is a way for us to make money,’” Summerlin said.
Cash crop
Hunter McBrayer, commodity division director for the Alabama Farmers Federation, has added hemp to his area of expertise. He said a lot of farmers trying to grow hemp see an opportunity for a profitable new crop that could tap into the CBD oil craze.
Cannabidiol, or CBD oil, which some people use as a treatment for physical ailments, is made from industrial hemp, a non-psychoactive type of cannabis sativa plant which contains less than 0.3 percent of THC, the intoxicating substance found in marijuana.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” McBrayer said. “This is not the first crop that came on board that promised to make people a lot of money. It could be a good thing for our farmers, but there are still a lot of challenges.”
In January, Alabama released guidelines for applying for a license to grow industrial hemp. An industry dormant for a century was ready to be reborn.
“There’s a huge learning curve for all of us,” said Brandon Dillard, a regional extension agent for the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. “We’re learning as we go.”
Dillard is working with an experienced farmer in Geneva County who planted hemp the first week of May and already has seen a few blooms. He also knows some farmers who bought a hemp license but have yet to get their hemp in the ground.
For hemp grown in fields, farmers must avoid even the residue of pesticides; no pesticides are allowed in growing the plant that is intended for CBD oil. There are potential issues of bugs, diseases and bad weather.
“It’s a lot of unknown,” said Rudy Yates, a regional extension agent for the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. “If they have a disease problem or insect problem, that will involve our team.”
Some other states had a head start on Alabama. Kentucky has had success transitioning from tobacco into hemp, and also had more history growing hemp as a crop.
“There’s a wide variety of questions; a lot of them we don’t have good answers to yet,” said Auburn University crop specialist Dennis Delaney. “We depend on looking at states like Kentucky and North Carolina and see how much we can use for here, with our climate and soils.”
Hemp history
Summerlin, Glaze, and their investing partner Philip Miles had to learn from the ground up. Glaze studied up on the issue and learned everything he could about growing hemp. They jumped on the return of a crop that had once been essential to colonial America, when King James required the growing of hemp in 1619 in Jamestown, Va. Hemp growing was also required by law in Massachusetts in 1631 and Connecticut in 1632. George Washington grew hemp as one of his main crops at Mount Vernon from the 1750s to the 1770s before becoming commander of the Continental Army and later the nation’s first president. He used hemp for rope, thread, boat sails and fishing nets.
Alabama likely never grew much hemp because historically cotton grew well here and was historically the state’s best cash crop, Delaney said.
The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 essentially outlawed growing hemp. It is visually indistinguishable from a marijuana plant, so the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and later the Drug Enforcement Administration lumped hemp with marijuana.
During World War II, when Japan cut off hemp rope imports from the Philippines, the U.S. government lifted the ban on growing hemp because of a need for rope for Navy ships and parachutes. The Department of Agriculture produced a 1942 documentary, “Hemp for Victory,” encouraging farmers in Kentucky and some other states to grow hemp. After the war, the nation reverted to its ban on growing hemp.
The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 put cannabis in the category of Schedule I, reserved for the most dangerous drugs.
The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2009 distinguished hemp from marijuana. The 2014 Farm Bill allowed states to license farmers to grow hemp. In 2016, Alabama passed the Industrial Hemp Research Program Act to develop a licensing and inspection program.
The Hemp Farming Act of 2018, part of the federal farm bill, removed hemp from the list of Schedule I controlled substances.
“A lot of people have a lot of wrong ideas,” Glaze said. For example, it is impossible to get high from hemp. “It has no value to smoke it or use for hallucinogenic purposes,” said Alabama Agriculture Commissioner Rick Pate. “If you tried to smoke it, you’d get sick as a dog.”
Some applicants drop out
The state approved 180 applications from those who wanted to grow hemp, but only 152 of those approved paid $1,000 to get licenses. Each grower has to notify the state with information about its supplier of seeds or cloned plants, and provide testing results of THC levels. The state must approve the strain of hemp seed or hemp plant brought into the state. Strains of hemp that test too high in THC are denied approval.
“I know people approved for hundreds of acres who’ll be lucky to get any in,” Glaze said. “It’s really difficult to get approved to buy plants.”
While Summerlin and Glaze planted in a field, some will try to grow it indoors.
Stuart Raburn of Southern Organics in Shelby County specializes in aquaponics, providing lettuce mixes, tomatoes and herbs to Alabama chefs and organic supermarkets. He’s built a hoop house specifically for hemp, where he hopes to be able to turn over several harvests in a year.
“I asked the state last fall about growing hemp and they said absolutely not,” Raburn said. He asked again after passage of the farm bill. The state sent him guidelines by the end of January. Alabama’s industrial hemp pilot program went from non-existent to up and running in a month.
“I am thoroughly impressed with what Alabama’s been able to do,” Raburn said. “There are a lot of benefits to hemp as a crop.”
Raburn said he’s bringing in 480 hemp plants from an established grower in North Carolina.
“Our belief is we have a brief window of time for hemp to be a cash crop,” Raburn said. “The supply has not caught up with demand yet.”
Once a large number of farmers are growing it, the supply will catch up with the demand for CBD oil, he said.
“We believe we’ll be able to grow hemp indoors without issues,” Raburn said. “If the price drops below what we get for heirloom tomatoes, we’ll go back to heirloom tomatoes.”
The state licensed hemp growers will be subject to inspection.
“It is a pilot program,” Pate said. “We have a responsibility to go out and inspect it.”
If somebody planted the wrong kind of hemp, “we’ll plow it under,” Pate said.
Alabama approved 70 applications from people wanting to have hemp processing operations, although only 59 paid the full fee to get their licenses. Becoming a processor typically takes a sizeable investment in equipment, from $250,000 to $1 million, and many growers don’t expect processing plants to be ready in Alabama this year. “It’s a lot tougher on the processors,” Glaze said.
Dillard said he knows of a processor hoping to turn Alabama’s hemp into CBD oil, but likely won’t be able to get that operation up and running until 2020. For this year’s harvest, Alabama growers may have to turn to out-of-state processors in Tennessee, Kentucky and North Carolina.
Alabama’s hemp processing plants would have to take shape quickly for an industry that doesn’t exist yet. “We would like to do local,” Summerlin said.
“We want to find a processor to press it into CBD oil,” Glaze said. He said he expects to rely on established processing plants in Kentucky or Tennessee to process their harvested hemp. So far, Alabama start-up processors are trying to figure out the basics of how they will operate, Glaze said. “No grower wants to be somebody’s guinea pig,” he said.
Growing like a weed
So far, the hemp has been flourishing at the foot of Chandler Mountain in the old horse pasture.
“I went out there this morning,” Summerlin said this past week. “It looks great. They’re growing like little weeds. Our only struggle right now is just getting them watered.”
They planned to plant another 4,000 plants this coming week. Although it may not have been part of what she learned earning her forestry degree, Summerlin said words of encouragement to her first hemp plants when they went into the ground. She’s still talking to them. “Every morning I go, ‘Hello girls, how pretty you are,’” Summerlin said.
“They’re a foot tall,” she said. “I think they’re doing really well.”