On Friday, Central Oregon hemp farmers watched in horror as severe thunderstorms pelted their hemp farms with balls of hail that were as big as golf balls. Nearly 500 acres were affected, and initial estimates are putting the loss at $25 million.
Most of the hemp that is grown in Central Oregon is dedicated to hemp varieties intended for CBD extraction. With each feminized seed being sold at $1, each acre of this type of hemp costs about $50,000 in seed alone.
It isn’t yet clear whether the affected plants will survive the effects of the hailstorm, so the final tally of how much has been lost could skyrocket.
Matt Cyrus, the Farm Bureau President of Deschutes County, who also owns a hemp farm called Triple C Farms, says that several remedies have been suggested to salvage the hail-damaged hemp plants. However, hemp is still a novel crop so it isn’t clear whether the solutions suggested will work.
Wesley Ray, a farmer with 35 acres of hemp in Bend, explains that he and his family embarked on a mission to save their crop after watching the hail rain down on the plants until a 6-inch layer of hail was covering the plastic mulch in the hemp fields.
Ray started by flushing and refilling the irrigation pond on his farm, and then followed this step with defoliating the hemp plants which were still standing. His experience in growing marijuana indoors taught him that when you exfoliate cannabis plants which have been damaged by hail, the added light penetration causes the plant to focus on growing buds instead of spending its limited energy reserves on sustaining the remaining leaves.
While exfoliation doesn’t cause an adverse economic impact on marijuana (since the buds are the major income earner), exfoliation of hemp reduces the biomass available for sale since the leaves are also harvested.
Nevertheless, Wesley Ray decided to exfoliate his hemp and lose some of the biomass in exchange for saving the plants and getting buds with a higher CBD content than would have been possible if the leaves had stayed on the plants.
Ray is already seeing encouraging signs that he will not lose his entire crop since the exfoliated plants are starting to show new bud development, even on plants that hadn’t budded prior to the hailstorm.
The storm also came at a time when hemp farmers were expressing their concerns that insurers weren’t eager to cover their crop. The few that offered policies imposed minimum farm sizes (25 acres) that could be covered. This left most of the hemp farmers, who have small farms, without storm insurance for their crop. For such farmers without insurance, bankruptcy may be staring them in the face if they had leveraged their farms to grow hemp this season.
Industry watchers believe the entire hemp industry, including players like Geyser Brands Inc. (TSX.V: GYSR) and Golden Developing Solutions Inc. (OTC: DVLP), should come together and find ways to lobby for appropriate federal and private insurance for hemp farmers so that adverse weather events don’t economically ruin the people who have ventured into growing hemp.
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