“It was definitely a huge blow to our business,” said Sam Bellavance, a cannabis farmer in Vermont who had separate licenses to grow both marijuana and hemp before USDA rescinded the latter earlier this year.
Bellavance estimates that he will lose at least $250,000 in revenue due to the license revocation.
The inconsistency between federal and state interpretations of the 2018 farm bill reflects the larger challenges hemp and marijuana farmers face in an emerging market where two nearly identical agricultural products have very different legal statuses. Even though more than half of Americans now live in a state where adults can legally possess weed — and 70 percent of Americans support marijuana legalization — under federal law it continues to be classified as a highly dangerous drug with no medical applications, the same as heroin.
Hemp industry officials complain that lack of legal and regulatory clarity from the federal government has scared off retailers from selling hemp-derived products and tanked the price of the crop.
That’s led farmers to dramatically reduce cultivation levels. In 2019, farmers planted 275,000 acres of hemp, but that plummeted to just 21,000 acres last year, according to Hemp Benchmarks.
USDA’s moves to rescind hemp licenses is further roiling the market.
“It’s just another example of the absurdity of keeping a substance, for which now 55 percent of Americans live in a jurisdiction where it’s legal, federally illegal,” said…
