Skip introduction: 2:20 Visit https://hemp.cals.cornell.edu/ to learn more about the 2024 Cornell Hemp webinar series.
Dr. David R. Gang
Professor, Institute of Biological Chemistry and
Director, Center for Cannabis Policy, Research and Outreach
Washington State University
2024 Cornell University Hemp Webinar Series
February 21, 2024
Abstract
Although hemp has holds great promise as a biomaterials, bioenergy and bioproducts plant, there are still several significant gaps in its industrial development in the US, and particularly in the Pacific Northwest. These include stable varieties bred for high performance under diverse local environmental conditions, a clear understanding of the genetics of key traits of industrial interest, establishment of appropriate processing facilities, and establishment of stable markets for specific product applications, among others. Hemp research at Washington State University over the past 4 years has worked to address these issues. The role that WSU plays in national germplasm development and national variety evaluation will be outlined. Implications from results from these efforts related to development of the hemp industry in the western US will be discussed. Also, an overview of efforts to build international connections and collaborations (and what we can learn from other nations, particularly France that has
maintained a vibrant fiber hemp industry) will be discussed as well. Finally, current policy issues (national, international, some regional) that affect the hemp industry will be discussed as well.
Bio
David R. Gang, PhD, a Professor in the Institute of Biological Chemistry at WSU, as well as the Director of WSU’s Center for Cannabis Policy, Research and Outreach. Dr. Gang received Bachelor’s degrees in Botany-Molecular Biology and German Literature from Brigham Young University in 1994 and PhD in Plant Physiology/Biochemistry from Washington State University in 1999.
His post-doctoral work in Plant Genomics/Evolution was with Eran Pichersky at the University of Michigan until 2000. He was then a Research Investigator at the University of Michigan until the end of 2001, when he moved to The University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor. After achieving the rank of Associate Professor with tenure at The University of Arizona, he moved back to WSU to join the faculty in 2009.
He also served for several years as the Chief Science Officer for a small start-up company, Botanisol LLC. He has served as the President of the Phytochemical Society of North America as well as on the executive boards of other international scientific societies, including currently Groupe Polyphenols.
Dr. Gang is a well-known world expert on medicinal compound identification and production within plants, particularly of plants from the mint and ginger families and from ancient plants, although he spends a lot of his time now working on hemp (Cannabis sativa) and marine microbes for their bioactive and industrial activities. His research uses modern approaches (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.) to investigate the structure, organization and regulation of metabolism within plants and other organisms (including some important insect pests and marine microbes).
Dr. Gang is dedicated to improving the human condition on this planet by increasing food availability and nutritional quality while reducing costs of production by better understanding how plants make the important bioactive compounds that they do and using that knowledge to improve plant properties, as well as by better understanding how plants interact with the environment.
He and his wife Darcy have been married for 32 years, and they are the parents of 7 children, 6 of which are in college, graduate school, or have entered the workforce, and the youngest is still at home. They have four grandchildren. When not actively engaged in his research, Dr. Gang enjoys scuba diving, hiking, cycling, and cross-country skiing, cabinet making and wood working, as well as modern board/strategy games.
This is a production of Cornell University and um thank you for joining us again as a reminder my name is beia zal and um if you attended the previous talks maybe you remember I’m a seconde PhD student in plant breeding and genetics uh here at Cornell University studying um hemp with Dr Larry
Smart um just so you know these webinars are being recorded So you’re able to return to them rewatch them or share them with others they’re hosted on our Cornell School of integr plant science YouTube channel also uh you can find more hemp resources on our Cornell hemp
Website I’ll include those links in the chat if you want to check them out as a reminder as I said earlier if you have questions for the speaker please put those in the Q&A box and uh we’ll answer those at the end and then any other
Comments you can put in the chat box um so thank you for joining us um I’d like to welcome our speaker today David Gang uh Dr gang is a professor in The Institute of biological um chemistry at Washington State University and he’s the director of Washington State’s uh Center
For cannabis uh policy research and Outreach he has special expertise on plant medicinal compound identification and production uh his lab uses is many different approaches such as genomics proteomics and metabolomics to investigate metabolism in plants and other organisms he received his PhD in plant physiology and biochemistry from Washington State University he’s also
Served as the president of the phytochemical Society of North America and as a chief science officer for a startup company uh banol he’s um dedicated to improving the life of people by by increasing food availability and nutrition while also reducing production costs uh by better understanding plant bioactive compound
Production and how plants interact with their environment so thank you David for joining us today I’ll uh let you take it away with your presentation okay good thank you again for the invitation to come and speak in this seminar series I’m very excited about the opportunity
Uh today I’m going to be talking about our efforts to try to integrate hemp research in Washington State University a number of years ago I um got involved with a project with some individuals at um the University of Minnesota looking at how cannabis produces bioactive compounds like the cannabinoids uh we
Did one of the first projects looking at transcriptome of the tricomes on uh Cannabis sativa and at that time uh you couldn’t work on hemp in the United States you really couldn’t work on cannabis in the United States only a few people could um and my expertise in triom isolation and metabolic pathway
Characterization was you know part of that effort and that got me interested in looking at the plant and I decided back in it was like 2006 a long time ago that there really wasn’t a lot we could actually do with it at the time because the regulatory situation was such in the
United States that it was basically impossible but things changed over the years I moved to Washington State University and once I got here it became clear that there was a big effort at Washington State to look at cannabis but there really wasn’t any effort to work on hemp because again there really there
Was not an opportunity to do so um years have passed we had a couple of farm bills pass 2014 Farm Bill uh Washington state did a very good job of trying to discourage anybody from working on it uh other states like I know New York and uh Oregon and and Colorado especially did
Were able to get these uh pilot programs going for hemp research uh we weren’t able to do that uh but when the 20 18 farm bill came along that opened up the door so we could finally move into this space and I’ve been very appreciative of the efforts and uh collaborations that
Have been established Across the Nation to try to move hemp research forward um that’s allowed us to do things that we really couldn’t do even a decade ago and it’s opening up doors for everybody Across the Nation and I think worldwide to be able to work on this very
Interesting plant one of the things that became clear to us in Washington state early on was that if we’re going to work on hemp um as we’re moving the industrial hemp side because I believe that fiber is really going to be the future of hemp yes there’s an important
Role for for cannaboid hemp CBD hemp for chemical hemp whatever you call it or essential oil hemp that is an important uh part of working with hemp but uh there is a limit to the scale of what that industry is going to be fiber on the other hand has a great potential to
To really do a lot to replace petroleum uh are uh the humankind’s addiction to petroleum on this planet and that’s one of the things that I’m very interested in trying to promote one of the ways that we do this is we work with Partners in the area um here in this picture are
Some of our partners from the Yakima Nation uh they have join with us to try to understand how hemp can grow and be developed as a important commodity in our region and how they as a community can be involved with this and promote its use in a way that will benefit their
Community especially and in order to do this some of the things that we have to deal with is there’s compliance issues with state and federal law but in our area especially and those compliance issues are relatively easy to deal with now at this point but the bigger issues
For us are really trying to optimize varieties that work well in our area figure out how the what the best production methods are for our area dealing with weed management is an issue as well and especially we need to be able to establish processing facilities here in the US um at the multi-state
Meeting a year ago in Colorado we had individual come and give a presentation and talking about how the development of these processing facilities is being promoted and developed in the nation and 5 years ago uh there was one processing plant in the US as of a year ago there
Were over 20 we’re getting close to 30 now um it’s great to see that happen but there’s none of those in the Northwest still and we’re very interested in trying to figure out how we can make that happen and move them into our area uh and in order for that to happen we
Have to demonstrate of course that the plant grows well and as you can see looking at the plants growing behind us here um if you’re not careful the plant grows too big actually it grows exceptionally well in Washington State we’re kind of like an ideal environment for it so we’re super excited about
Being able to work in a way to find Partnerships and develop ways that we can promote this plant and its development and the economy based on its development um in our region and as I like to talk about it we think about hemp um in a in a global local level
Where we think about it to function locally to produce it locally to process it locally produce products locally but we do that as a global effort where everybody nationally and internationally can promote it uh simultaneously so that products that include hemp are accepted and actually desired by everyone across
The planet and that will build our local Industries very well so here are some of the as I mentioned it’s a great location to grow hemp Washington State actually has some of the largest diversity of environments in the nation um but here are some questions that we have you know
What types of cultivars work well in our area and especially in different environments across the state we have a rain for us to a desert in our state and everything in between uh what are the suitable locations and what types and varieties grow in those locations and
Which of those conditions are really the best for different types of hemp and then how do we grow different types of hemp in the environments uh that we have in a way that leads to the best product quality and that also follows the Regulatory Compliance issues that we
Have to deal with finally thinking about all of that really what are the best hemp products that are the best suited for Washington State and and how do we make hemp available for those products and that’s going to include breeding efforts um so we have started moving in
That direction I am by no means a plant breeder as was mentioned by beia I’m my training is in plant biochemistry um but I’m working with individuals that are and we’re trying to move this effort forward in our area um in that direction also the way that we’re doing this as I
Mentioned we have Partnerships and that’s really the way that it works if you’re going to uh build an industry you have to build the right Partnerships uh big partnership is with the industrial hemp Association of Washington I hempa is the abbreviation for that and many growers in the area especially our
Tribal Partners as I mentioned the acon nation the confederated tribes of kova reservation toop tribe pallop tribe and N Pierce tribe are major partners with us in the area they’re all very interested in developing him uh for its fiber and grain applications and we’re very excited to work with them they’re
Partners with us on several grants that I’ll talk about in just a second as well we also have a major partnership with Oregon State University in UC Davis West Coast Tri part uh Tri-State partnership to try to develop a hemp bioeconomy on the west coast and I’ll talk about that
Briefly a little bit later too we also have Partnerships with ARs and part of the title of my talk is talking about this I’m going to a little bit later I will talk about what we are doing to contribute to this effort for The Germ plasm collection and of course the
Leaders on that are Zach and Tyler and I definitely recommend you talk to them for details I’m just going to give you uh for those that are not familiar with this system I’ll give you a brief overview of what it is and functions and talk briefly about what we’re doing to
Help contribute to that and I think it’s a great effort an important effort for us to be involved with that and finally we’re involved in many uh variety trials that are helping us both in our effort to figure out what grows in our area but also kind of at the national effort to
See what grows in different parts of the country there are varieties that some people love that perform exceptionally well in the um upper Plains area one of many of you may know of it it’s called x59 for a grain it grows really well in Western in eastern Montana and The
Dakotas and it is not a very good variety for our area we’ve had many people try to grow it it just doesn’t work we don’t know why it doesn’t work so well in Washington and Oregon um but there are others that perform a lot better and that’s interesting and useful
Information to know and why is it that different varieties perform in different areas differently that’s important information for us to know as we’re trying to build this industry so that as I said we have this Global local economy that we are developing okay in order to be able to
Do this we’ve been able to get some uh very important Grant support uh the director of the hemp Association in Washington her name is Bonnie Joe Peterson uh we and I have been working together as close partners for many years now in trying to develop this since we could first start working with
It right after 2018 Farmville was passed it took a year and a half for Washington to get everything lined up so we could actually start working with it so it wasn’t until 2020 that we could really be involved um and at that time Bonnie Jill and I were talking about like man
It would be wonderful if we could get Grant support to work on this um and about that time we talked with Oregon State and we put and Jeff uh Steiner’s the lead on this grant it’s a nifa sustainable a systems Grant or SAS Grant and it’s focusing on the west coast bio
Economy this is a a very wonderful Grant to help us all work towards developing this industry in the Western United States and a lot can be learned from from the efforts and the results of this project uh for other parts of the country but four years ago this was like
An imagination could we do something like this there’s no Grant support there’s no programs but in just a couple years that all started to change uh We’ve very lucky in being able to get access to grant funding that helps us uh we got a Sac Grant a specialty agricultural crop Grant or something
Like that oh especially an alternative crop Grant from nifa that supports the effort for The Germ plasm collection development uh we got a $ 45 million climate smart Commodities Grant with Oregon State looking at uh integrating regenerative practices in a potato cropping systems which is very very hard
On the soils hemp can help alleviate those problems or repair the soils and so a part of what we’re doing there in that Grant is looking at how hemp can help benefit farmers and Growers um we just recently got a $700,000 grant for a year to look at pesticide uptake in
Cannabis plants including hemp um and I just was announced to us recently that we’re getting a grant from the doe to look at the integration of hemp and biochar in crop rotation systems and what impact those the integration of those two components into that cropping system has on both carbon sequestration
But especially carbon durability and greenhouse gas emissions and also of course it’s not going to work if you don’t benefit the crop so we’re looking at yield and you know quality product product quality for those crops but we’re excited about this grant it’s a six-year Grant that’s going to be
Starting up that’s already starting up this year we’re very excited about the future for that and we’re also uh we’re GNA we just heard we’re having another Grant that’s going to be supported uh that we’re going to be able to talk about very soon so things have changed
Completely in just about three years in terms of the grant scene in the US us we went from thinking maybe someday they’ll be grant opportunities to all of a sudden there are many opportunities that’s very exciting for the hemp industry and for hemp development Nationwide and we’re not alone in you
Know being able to get receive this kind of support um and as I said Washington state is an ideal location for the hemp a industry here’s uh our field trial from a couple of years ago at our prer research station uh you can see the
Plants this is um I think this is like mid August the plants are doing really really well um this area is surrounded by hop farms and tree fruit from apples to cherries to pears um and some berries there’s a lot of blueberries in the area as well and hemp just loves growing in
This area and it’s very easy to perform research but it’s also difficult in some other ways and I’ll talk about that in a minute because some things come along that make a challenge for you but as you can see you know as as things mature they the plants develop as you expect
And we’re very excited about the opportunity to perform research in this area to help support the industry development um our variety trial in 2021 was the first one where we actually were able to put out plants on this you know plastic tarp kind of a system drip irrigation underneath we did a density
Trial where we grew plants at a higher density and at a low and at a lower density to evaluate how they um perform we also did a comparison of transplants as you would expect for the system but also direct seeding where you we punctured the the tarp and put the seeds
In to see what we got for a difference and I’ll talk about that results of that in just a second and as the plants grow uh you see a big difference at first between those that are transplants and those that are the direct seated plants the direct seated were these were
Started at the same uh planted at the same time and these are a lot further behind the transplants take off and seem to perform a lot better at first um we get to the end Harvest Time and we see different varieties and different plots have uh different kinds of results which
Of of course is what you would expect but was really interesting and here’s what it looks like in 2023 we actually got a little bit better at this and I love these pictures at Harvest Time how the different plants have their different colors one of the things we’re
Also interested in looking at me as a biochemist is not just canabo and terpenoids but also other compounds that hemp makes like some of the flavenoids that lead to these colors um and these kind of variety trials will allow us to do that but the big thing that we’re
Interested in of course is supporting the industry which is going to be looking at turpenoid and canabo profile um and so we’ve got students as you can see here um in the background a couple of students are out there collecting data from our plots This Is How We Do It
Um it’s manually intensive uh kind of tedious work but it’s the kind of work you have to do to get results uh using the research scale efforts that we’re able to do here on our you know three plus acre plots here and uh I showed this picture just a second ago this is
That comparison of transplant uh versus direct seated and at first we thought there was going to be you know the transplants would outper perform the direct seated but when we actually look at the date oops Sor we actually look at the data we see there’s actually the opposite happened we have a
Significantly higher yield when we direct seed the plants as opposed to uh put transplants in the ground this is two different varieties um lifter triploid and diploid from um a supplier in Oregon and what was really interesting to us is it’s almost a double uh increase in yield when you do
The direct seated we think the reason for this is root architecture uh when we pull out the transplanted plants they tend to have highly branched Roots a uh multiple sort of tap Roots but more like branches um the direct seeded plants tend to have a single tap rot within
Branches off of that and we think that single tap rout is really important for the plant to be able to support a larger yield um at least that’s what it’s looking like in our our area in procure and we’re we’re evaluating data from last year and year before as well to see
If this is holding up but it looks like that’s the case um this is really interesting because it does tell you that there are how you grow the plant really can have an impact on what your results are going to be all right we’re also involved in the
Dual grain and fiber the sorry the Grain and fiber and dual grain fiber uh variety trials uh this is led by the multi-state project What’s called the te the s184 project uh there’s over a dozen universities Nationwide they’re involved with this um we grow ours like this in
These uh 10 x 20 flip plots we found that it’s important to have a wide enough plot to get proper height of the plants if you do a skinny plot like this one here this is only 5 feet wide the plants here are about 50% shorter or
Maybe they reach about 75% the height of the plants when you put them in a larger plot and that height difference makes a difference in yield as well so how you grow the plant really makes a difference how you study it and how you how you grow it for your research makes a
Difference if you’re going to grow it in a large field ultimately which is what I think everybody does at the industrial scale you’re not going to grow them in little tiny plots you’re going to grow it at a large acreage you need to have a plot that is going to be similar in
Terms of its ability to produce the plant as that high acreage uh plot would do and at the same time that we grew these we grew some other um strip plots that were a quarter acre an eighth of an acre in size and we saw that we got the
Same plant height same plant diameter on average in the middle of the plots is what we got on those larger strip plots as opposed to the smaller little plots where the plants are really you have a major Edge effect that affects your ability to grow the plants now we do the
Way that we’re growing them we do have this aisle you can see that in between the plots that’s important for us to get into them and harvest them these plants in our area they get to be 12 13 14 15 feet tall and if you had these all next
To each other it’s like a jungle it’s very difficult to find where anything is so for us to manage it this is how we have to do it um but it’s interesting the results that we get here’s my uh field manager uh Greg Garza he’s six
Foot four and you can see the plants uh really dwarf him we have two different varieties here on the left and the right and there’s a big difference in height that you can tell here and we see that uh when we evaluate these different varieties they performed all of them
Perform very well in Washington but some of them really outperform others and we’re very interested to see how that’s going to uh go forward in our research efforts I don’t have good results from 2023 because unfortunately our plot that was assigned us at the research and Extension Center um had been used by
Hops Growers before a couple years before and they didn’t tell anybody and they didn’t tell us until after we did some work and our plants weren’t surviving um that they had unfortunately sprayed the field with some long-term residual herbicides and hampus is apparently very susceptible to those and
So we didn’t really get any growth from those plants uh each of these plots has close to 3,000 plants that comes up and grows and we I think on the best plot we had less than 200 that survived most of them we had two or three or five plants
That survived this herbicide treatment what’s interesting about that is some of them actually grew okay and so we think that’s interesting and we’re evaluating looking at the we’re actually doing some genome sequencing with Hudson Alpha on this to evaluate what the differences are between those different individuals that survived versus um
Other individuals in another area where the same variety was grown but they’re not the ones that they’re a typical plant from that variety very curious to see if we can find information about herbicide resistance that might be useful for other in this effort going forward um here’s what they look like at
The end of the season kind of on the actually on the opposite side of that plot there’s Greg again and Bonnie Joe and we see a big difference in maturity date for different varieties and the grain yield and and the fiber yield as well and this effort is an ongoing
Effort but we’re excited to be part of it to see and to demonstrate to people in our region that hemp can grow very very well in Washington state um we just need to give it a chance and get people involved um one of the ways that we’ve
Done that is get our tribal Partners involved here is a we had a a 12 acre field that we grew seven different varieties on um this past year and um these are fiber and dual crop varieties here’s where they are right after planting this is one that’s grown mainly
For fiit of French variety called Futura 83 we really like this one in Washington state it grows exceptionally well produces uh apparently good Bast quality Bast fiber quality quality as well as having very good herd production and for a lot of the individuals that we’re working with especially the tribal
Partners they’re very interested in hemp because of the uh promise it has for helping with the housing problems that they have we have a housing crisis in Washington state we’re actually the number one state in the nation for lack of availability of housing of appropriate housing for people um and
The tribal Partners especially have a major problem um about 20% uh between 10 and 20% depending on the tribe of the tribe members don’t have housing that’s appropriate for them um and it’s not that they don’t have the ability to have it just does not exist and so they’re
Very interested in finding ways to produce housing in a way that’s going to be number one sustainable that’s the big thing that they’re most important that’s most important to them now is they need to have a sustainably built house and something that’s going to last a long
Time something that’s not going to be made out of materials that are toxic to people something that’s not going to promote mold growth which a lot of our chipboard based housing in the Northwest tends to do we a lot of the housing in uh our in Washington state has been
Condemned because of black mold growth it’s a big problem in our state it’s one of the reasons we have a housing shortage hemp can solve a lot of these problems you build a house out of hemp you don’t have those problems you don’t have the mold problem you don’t have
Rodent problem you don’t have insect infestation problems um this has been demonstrated in many parts of the world and we’re very excited about being able to integrate this type of housing into our area the tribes are very excited about this so they’re very interested in what they can do to help support the
Development of the industry and be part of this and build up the industry within their communities so this is the the field at the end of the season this is what it looks like uh we’re not quite at Harvest time we could be at Harvest time they harvested a little bit later than
Year um this is Bonnie Joe again and our partner Jackie um and as you can see the plants again grow really well this is a essentially a dry Farm up in Northern Washington it did really really well and we’re very excited to see how this plant
Can perform across the state um this is another grower partner down near Us near prer and Sunnyside the variety here that looks yellow it’s supposed to be yellow it’s a variety called feor it’s from it’s a French variety it doesn’t look green when it’s mature it kind of likes
To look yellow it it one of the things that’s really exciting about this variety is that it requires significantly less nitrogen than most other crops and especially other hemp varieties uh if you give it 100 pounds per acre it actually doesn’t like it it likes it more like the 50 to 30 pounds
Per acre nitrogen in the soil and so it does exceptionally well and produces very high quality fiber when you grow it that way you can get it to be a little bit more robust and grow a little bit bigger if you give it more nitrogen but you actually don’t get an increase in
Fiber and the quality of the fiber actually goes down so it’s important to understand what your soil is like what your nutrient quality is like in the soil and what the requirements of the individual varieties are and then when this gets mature oh this is sorry this
Is the futur 83 again with a couple my students and me out there in the field this is in the same plot in the kind of in the background of that big picture there and again you know across the state these varieties do very very well
And we’re very excited to work with our grower partners and the seed suppliers to help us evaluate and determine which are really going to be most suitable for industry development in our area back to the essential oil uh evaluation here are the students uh and I out in the field
We doing sampling we’re looking actually here at turpine production and cannaboid production over time we’ve collected samp from marked plants you can see the little flag there so we can go back and know where they are this is early about halfway through the season later the plants are taller than Drew and Toby
There and and me they grew really well again and we’re very interested to see how the results are going to turn out for the canono and turpine development uh they’re still processing all of the plants and extracting them and going to be analyzing those very very soon for
The chemical profiling all right but as we’re doing this research we do also have some issues that come up along the way um and some of these are biotic and some of them are abiotic in nature one of the things that has affected the western United States especially over the last
Several years has been wildfires although I understand uh New York and the Northeast was affected by this this last year as well from these big fires that were up in Quebec if I remember right um You also got to deal with the smoke we’ve been dealing with it for a
Number of years in the west uh 2020 was an exceptionally bad year we had fires all over Washington all over Oregon um some days were so bad they basically said don’t even think about going outside the air quality was was horrendous you could see maybe 20 feet
In front of you as you’re walking outside in some places uh it was really really awful um what does this mean for our crops well we know that if you are a wine producer and smoke is in the area the some of the compounds and they’ve actually finally figured this out can go
Look this up if you want there’s a a a process called smoke paint where compounds from the smoke are taken up by the berries by the great berries and then they are sequestered in the vacuum of the berries so that they are no longer available uh in terms of human
Easy access so if you taste the berries you you know you go out there your field has been exposed to smoke and you go out there and you taste the berries they actually don’t taste like smoke they taste fine uh what the plant did is it took those smoke compounds which are
Actually quite potent in in Aroma and flavor to hum once they’re released and it they glycolate them and sequester them in the vacle of the gra Berry so you can’t taste them but you put those berry in the wine making process and all of a sudden that glycos you know there’s
Glycosidases there and that that glycidic bond is broken and when you open up your wine after it’s been sitting for months all of a sudden you wonder why does it smell like smoke why is it so bad and that’s what they call smokeing it’s a real problem for the
Wine industry now that we know what those compounds are they can actually test for them there’s a Poss ability that hemp is going to be affected the same way so if you have a fire like this putting smoke in the air you end up with smoke in the air where you’re growing
Your hemp this was an Autoflower variety that was grown by a grower partner back in 2020 um autoflowers this is about the best you can get for autoflowers in Washington I think this is the best field anybody’s everever had plants get to be a foot and a half tall that’s it I
Know in the South they grow a lot better but in our area they really don’t grow well and the smoke tank really we think affected them as well also as you can see sun does not penetrate to the plants very well it affects the growth it
Affects the yield lots of things can be affected when smoke is present so this is an issue luckily 2023 was much better we had much less smoke in our area you guys on the East Coast got to get it were able to benefit from the lovely benefits of smoke instead we’re happy to
Pass that along for the future but uh we don’t know what’s going to happen in 2024 this year is a new year we could see smoke come back we could see the wildfires come back so this is going to be something that’s a concern going forward we have to figure out how to
Deal with it and there’s reports here you know that basically the hemp industry is being very severely affected and this is our our there was a nice story about this it’s really pretty sad that same year we also had a major Windstorm come through knocked over a bunch of plants especially taller plants
That people had some individuals were looking at hybrids between fiber and essential oil types to see if they could do a dual crop there and a lot of those plants were pretty severely affected as you can see from the pictures here they were knocked over eventually most of
These fell on their side they had to go out and harvest them much earlier than they were hoping to before they rotted in the field it was uh pretty bad situation so lots of uh environmental effects can can impact your crop you can also have something like a heat wve in
2021 so the year after the major smoke we had a major heat wave that lasted for two years 118 Fahrenheit for those that are not in the US that’s about 48 degrees Centigrade it’s really hot that was the high temperature for two weeks it never got below 90 Fahrenheit or
About 32 um Centigrade at night uh the plants did not like it unfortunately this hit unexpectedly like less than a week after we put our plants in the ground we were lucky we were able to keep water on them they came up they look pretty chlorotic they don’t look
That great as you can see and then you see there’s lots of weeds that came up here too the Lamb’s quarters and the pig weed which are major weeds in our area they were not as effective they came up actually after the heat wave um and we
Had a problem that whole year in dealing with this weed problem um we didn’t have at the time chemical control for weeds available to us uh so we had major impacts on the crop that we saw um as the year went along we still you know major weeds came in kind of
Really outcompeted the hemp you really need to get canopy closure by the hemp if you get canopy closure nothing out competes it at all but if you don’t you can have serious problems with these weeds this is like the best looking plot that year it looks pretty bad um these
Plants got to be this is a a Carmen Yola variet from from Italy these plants got to be 12et tall like we kind of anticipated but you know it’s a handful this should have been a very dense plot like you saw on the previous slide um but it didn’t because the weed problem
Was pretty severe dealing with weeds is a big issue finding weed control methods is a big issue we think that planting at the right time for your region getting the crop up getting canopy closure before the weeds come in is really critical and experiments we’re doing this year are going to address this
Question as well um and if you look at the essent oil hemp varieties they’re in the middle what looks like it’s a little bit darker green um these are our hemp plants trying to compete against the grasses we went we had to do so much manual weeding this year it was awful um
Trying to keep up with it was a big challenge so again it but eventually they did do better and they kind of look like this um they don’t look great these are the ones on the right here are plants that are under pla under plastic you can’t see the plastic because the
Plants grew so well um but the plants on the bare soil we were trying to do a higher density and they just really did not perform well against the weeds the other thing that happened with that heat wave some of the varieties that we had planted really were affected
You can see the ones here on the left or in the background they actually look pretty good they had good yields uh but this particular Variety in the middle here it did not um The Roots were affected severely the plants grew they actually looked really good early on
Compared to other varieties but then they stopped growing and it looks like the roots basically just kind of rotted and they fell over and didn’t do well the next year in 2022 they did a lot better uh we grew the same variety again and there wasn’t a heat wave they grew a
Lot better but when there was this major heat stress this variety did not perform very well um the other thing that we saw was some biotic effects we have insects that come in and we have some viruses beet curly Top This is what an example of
What it can look like on a hemp plant um it’s spread by Leaf Hoppers and it is endemic to Washington State that’s actually where it’s from we think originally it’s from our part of the world it’s spread across the United States from here um the leaf hoppers
Live on 200 plus species in Washington state all of those can contain the virus it was originally identified obviously in beets but it’s found in many different crops it’s in beans it’s in carrots it’s in onion it’s in most crops it doesn’t really have much of an impact
Most hemp plants it doesn’t have much of an impact um here’s an example of one where it does and some varieties were much more susceptible than others to this some varieties appeared to have no impact at all from this virus we did some testing we evaluated plants to see
If it was present almost every plant had the virus almost every plant that we tested had this hopen viroid um most of the plants look beautiful but a few of them didn’t so there’s definitely a genetic resistance effect occurring here and trying to figure out what that is is
Going to be really interesting I think as well but there’s been a lot of interest and concern in especially the indoor cannabis industry about this hopl and vroid um especially in areas like California um as I said we see it in every single plant that we looked at and
Most of the plants don’t appear to be affected at all now maybe there’s a 10 20% yield decrease that we are not even able to tell because it’s there and everything and if we were to get rid of it we would see it actually a better performance of the plants in our area
That could happen there’s actually no way to test that um this virid is everywhere our fields are surrounded by hops um in our area and it’s just going to be in every plant that we deal with um I guess an advantage there is that we have a possibility to screen or grow
Varieties that are more resistant to it those that perform the best are potentially going to be more resistant to that viroid what we do see as the most interesting impact though is that if you combine beat curly top and Holan vroid and another virus when those three are
Present in the plant you see symptoms like this only worse and so it looks like if you really hit the plant with a multiple um pathogen attack it has a hard time resisting that if one of them comes along it does pretty okay but if lots of them are there if they’re all
Attacking it simultaneously then the plant could be severely affected we think we need to follow up more research to figure out if that’s really the case but that’s our current hypothesis at this time okay so now I’m going to talk briefly about the our efforts in the um National Juran plasm collection again
This is in collaboration with Zach and Gordon there at the Geneva AR facility but also uh the project is being led by Charlie brummer and his post. Daniel papet um you UC Davis um here’s what our uh field looked like a back in 2022 we have a similar uh setup last year I
Don’t have as good of a picture from last year as I do from 2022 I got a better image here so I’m showing that one but it looked very similar in 2023 and what we’re doing is evaluating numerous uh accessions in this germ plasm collection about 40 35 to 45 each
Year and seeing how they grow individually we’re looking at their growth performance and we’re looking at seed quality and a bunch of different factors um as as you may or may not know in the United States we have this ger plasm system National plant ger plasm system as it’s called
Npgs um and there are different facilities around the country one of those is in Geneva New York one of those is actually in Pullman Washington where I’m located in Pullman the collection for beans like broad beans dry beans like Pinos or kidney beans or black beans the the National Collection for
Beans is here and for many grasses is here and for some other crops for hemp however the National Collection has been set up in Geneva Washington and that’s where Zach and Tyler are and so we’re working with them these other sites have other crops um where they focus on
Maintaining The Germ plasm if you are interested in accessing any crop and getting seed from any crop you can contact this system and you can request those seeds and they will ship them to you for free they don’t give you you know bucket loads of this they won’t
Give you a freight train car full of it but they’ll give you uh about a 100 seeds that you can work with From Any Given variety any accession that you’re interested Ed in and so you can use that to evaluate different crops for your area or even for breeding efforts as
Well so we think this is a wonderful system that’s available to everybody in the world not just the United States and I try to emphasize that um many people in the US know about it are using it and are finding that it’s very very beneficial to them um in hemp um and in
Fact the broader plant Cannabis sativa as as you I hope know uh Cannabis sativa is one species the high THC versions are used for quote unquote marijuana or high TC cannabis or cannabis there’s different words that are used for it now uh for medicinal application or for recreational purposes in different parts
Of the world and then there’s the industrial hemp versions or the chemical hemp versions that are used for other applications it’s all the same species um and there are just different versions of it that have different properties that have been bred over uh the generations for thousands and thousands
Of years to have these different properties and those are now spread across the world and this germplasm collection is working on collecting individuals from those different populations around the world so that we get the best quality diversity into our collection so it’s available for all these efforts that we have for improving
The crop to support the industry development um ways that we look at this is again we collect and conserve different germ um genetic resources these are then distributed part of this of course is you need to know what it is that you’re looking at so phenotyping and genotyping the material is very very
Important and we also Zach and Tyler especially are working on developing tools and methods that will help serve the hemp Community for the ability to look at these plants and use them um this germplasm collection has great value I believe I think many other people do to help support the industry
Um because it provides novel uh phenomic and genomic resources and scientific tools for hemp it’s helping to develop those we get good information about diverse traits that are being mapped onto populations this then leads to genetic U material and diversity that can be integrated into breeding programs they are developing some pre
Pre-breeding populations which will then be used in future efforts to do larger scale breeding efforts and this helps us we think um in dealing with issues such as germ plas and bottlenecks um because we’re able to get the biggest diversity of germplasm into the system and into these breeding programs the way that
This has gone over the last several years as we’re now at close to 600 accessions that have been acquired there used to be a collection a long time time ago um but as you may know in the early 70s the world started this thing called The War on Drugs um cannabis was uh
Particularly targeted and The Germ plasm collection that was in existence at that time disappeared there’s some information about it but none of the material actually existed so we are we started from scratch back in 2021 to rebuild this collection um Zach and Tyler leading the effort and those of us
At partner institutions helping them we’re doing a lot with the phenotyping um which I’ll show in just a second to help distribute to help develop this um system so that those interested in using this germplasm collection will have interesting and useful information available to them the trials that are being conducted
For the phenotyping effort are around the country uh we’re up here in Oregon sorry above Oregon in Washington um our initial effort was in aell but we’ve now moved to prer we have a better facility there and we got actually permission to grow there finally um but there’s
Facilities and in California Oregon New York um and down in Louisiana and here in Tennessee as well we’re looking at traits such as flowering time sex determination plant architecture fiber quality grain quality such as yield protein content fatty acid content and profile and um diversity and specialized metabolites such as tpin and
Cannabinoids and we’re also very interested in this G bye connection you know genetics by environment if we grow the same things in these different regions which are very different from each other across the nation what do we see in terms of the results very interested to see how that all pans out
Over the years this is the pipeline how it works Geneva is the location central location for all of the information The Collection is maintained there they have database this grin Global if you look this up the search green Global you’ll be able to find the accession and be
Able to the accessions that are available and request those that provides information to breeders and researchers and then we’re right here in this gray one in the kind of in the middle as part of the phenotyping trials others are involved in other part parts of evaluation of the products and also
Maintaining The Germ plasm collection but we’ve been a we’re very excited to be part of this it’s very interesting to see how these different varieties different accessions perform and grow in our area part of how we’re doing this is we’re looking at growth characteristics using what we call a kite kind of a
Diagram where you look at the diameter of the stem you look at how tall it is you look at how wide it is and how tall it is to the W width different accessions will have different shapes of this kite some will look like this some will be inverted some almost look like
An upside down triangle depending on the variety and those are uh very interesting characteristics that can tell us information about what that variety might be uh potentially used for whether for fiber or for some other application for grain or or if you’re growing it for CBD or other chemicals um the
Architecture of the plant can have an impact on um productivity and yield and so understanding the growth characteristics of the plant is very is very very important um look at Leaf phenotype as well see how big the leaves are are what their structure is um we look at
Flowering date days to flowering and we see big differences depending on the variety um if we look at canabo level again we see very big differences in types of canabo for the different accessions looking at CBD cbv Etc you can see a list here all of
These if they are hemp they have very low levels of THC um there is the ability in the the USGA germ plasm system to maintain some varieties that end up having levels of THC we don’t actually grow those at our facility if we we know that they’re high because we
We have to work under the USDA um based hemp programs which means we have to use we have to grow hemp that’s lower than 3% THC so those are the varieties that we’re evaluating although the collection itself has had some donations that are higher um and then what we are doing in
My lab is we are doing a lot of the phenotyping for the seed protein as well as lipids we also can do the chemical analysis too Although our partners at the ARs are doing that for this project um but we can look at canabo and tpes
Etc and some examples of results that we see from from these efforts are really interesting for example we had a CBG cultivar that we were looking at one of our grower Partners grew we took individual plants from across the field they all looked really the same if you
Look at them morphologically um it looked like a what you would call a pretty good variety some of these varieties are highly variable in morphology I would not call them varieties I would call them populations although sometimes they’re listed as a variety or cultivar this was one that
Looked like a really good cultivar but the chemistry was very different when we compared individual plants to each other for CBD CBG and even THC um and we see this repeatedly across a lot of these accessions and and varieties and cultivars that we look at that there is
A lot of chemical diversity that is maintained Within These different populations uh to us that suggests there’re not uh at the point where I would call them a you know like a true breeding line um um but that might actually be very important and useful if
You’re growing them in a field with a highly variable environment where you’ve got pathogens and you know pests coming in coming along that could be deterred by different chemistry so in some ways having a diversity of chemicals is important potentially for the crop to be successful but if you’re growing them
Specifically for certain compounds like CBG you really don’t want a lot of plants in your field that have THC and CBD right so information like this is important as we move forward with breeding efforts um we see the same kind of thing with tpin these are some of the
Major Tarpin that you typically see but we see a big difference in the ratios to each other um again this is a cross that was made the same exact type of genetics was what was claimed but the chemistry again was quite different um if we look
At the seed oil content we also see a big diversity across lines these are all grown uh for fiber or or seed or dual crop purposes and we see that some of these if you notice some of them have like an abbreviation like this beer braisy we got seed from a couple of
Different sources and we saw differences in the content of the oil um they were grown in the same location same field but the seed source uh was gave us a slightly different result uh for this x-59 we really didn’t see much of a difference um some places see x59 oil
Content a lot higher we don’t it’s pretty much average compared to the other ones that we’ve seen um for some of our other varieties like this gin ma this is a Chinese variety it’s really only grown for fiber it has very large seeds in size but very low weight seeds
They actually tend to be H mostly Hollow they have very low protein very low oil content um and I would definitely not grow this for seed um people definitely grow up for fiber instead but it’s interesting to use those as a comparison we also looked at not just the oil
Content we looked at the fatty acid composition and we saw that there was a pretty common Trend which is that the poly and UNS saturated fatty acids here in uh purple and black and this tan or peachy color that’s the majority of the fatty acids that are present in hemp
Seed you throw on the monounsaturated c81 you’re like typically 90% of the fatty acids in the hemp seed oil are mono and poly polyunsaturated uh very different from most other crops it’s one of the reasons why number one it’s great for your heart this has um Omega 6 and omega-3 fatty
Acids in it which are very interesting um but also for industrial applications um because of the highly unsaturated nature compared to other fatty acid bearing crops um it has great potential for certain industrial applications like making glues and resins Etc so finding out which variety uh differs from others is also very
Important here and one of these x59 did have a big increase in this um Omega 6 of course the Omega-3s are the ones that you’re most interested in for your heart so that’s something to think about um and again here’s as I said different ones uh the same variety we did see this
Though is that the even though we saw a difference in yield as I showed on the previous one we the composition really did not change much so what we think is happening here is that the composition of the fatty acid is probably most significantly controlled by the genetics
And the yield is affected and sometimes substantially by the environment and the environment could be the current field that it’s in or it also could be an epigenetic effect where the parent where the mo the mother plant where the seed came from was grown so if you get seed
Sources from different locations you could see a difference in your fatty acid yield um if you grow it in the same exact field we’re going to follow this up um with seeing what our results from last year tell us if we see the same kind of result this is an interesting uh
Preliminary Trend though suggesting this might be something really interesting um for the industry development down the road okay and that was a Gino one so conclusions here for the phenotyping the hemp varieties are often highly variable and I put varieties and quotations there um and they appear to be populations
Instead of really true breeding lines the seed composition is genetically determined mostly we think but content can be significant impacted and these biotic and abiotic stressors such as a heatwave or smoke or a virus can have a significant impact both on our phenotyping efforts as well as
Potentially on the plants elves so what does all this mean for industry development the next couple of minutes here um understanding how to grow the plant having the production requirements figured out for your area is really critical we know now what we need for how to grow the seed what kind of soil
Preparation is needed and understanding which varieties to select for your valuation and an ultimate production is also critical um these are some different fields grown in 2019 by some of our partner Growers and you can see they’re very very different from each other this is supposed you know this is
The same crop it’s all hemp but it can be grown very very differently depending on where you grow it and what your purposes are and those different growth parameters are really important for what your ultimate uses are going to be so you need to think about that the other
Thing you have to think about is how you’re going to harvest it um yields for the plants for CBD can be as much as a th000 to 2,000 pounds per acre for flower varieties fiber these plants can easily be 10 to 18 feet tall or taller
Um you can yield 1 and a half to 5 tons of fiber per acre depending on where you grow it grain yield can be 1,000 to 1600 lbs per acre a lot of places it’s lower it’s in the the mid F you know 400 to
600 range in our area they tend to be in this higher area higher range um if you’re going to grow it for a cut flower market you have to do it by hand if you’re going to grow up for seed using a combine is what you want if you’re going
To grow up for fiber you’re going to want something like a sickle mower um grain and fiber together you’re going to combine it and then do something like a cyle mower if you’re growing for super high quality fiber applications like textiles you’re probably going to want
To have a reading system involved a lot of this is going to be helped by automation um by equipment a lot of that does not exist in our area it is being Acquired and developed Across the Nation and we’re going to see that Trend growing and over the next few years
We’re going to see a lot more availability of equipment that will help us with the H with the uh harvesting efforts and then finally the you got ask you says well you know do I really want to grow this um is it something worth pursuing well the first question of
Course is if you’re a grower is you have to ask your question about profitability what kind of yield am I going to get what kind of price am I going to get and then what are my input costs if I’m growing it is it going to replace
Something on my farm or in our area we think that it actually adds benefit by being a rotation crop and that’s what that new Grant from doe is going to help us support um investigating is looking at its integration into crop rotation systems uh what does it do for the
Impact on other crops there’s been some suggestion in and some papers published on this that in wheat especially but also maybe other grass crops like corn you can see a bump in yield in that grass crop if you grow it after you grow your hemp um and we think that a reason
For that is that the hemp does some very positive things to the soil loosens it and makes uh nutrients more available to other crops after the fact you do have to deal with government restrictions and red tape for example you have to put GPS coordinates to your field you have to
Test for THC Etc but those are not really that honorous now that we’ve figured out how to make this work you do also have to consider things like Risk what happens if you have fires in your area what’s that going to do to your yield what happens if you have
Windstorms what happens with whatever else that might happen um is there crop insurance available well when I first put this slide together back at the beginning of 2020 there was no such thing as crop insurance for hemp that has changed that is now becoming available Across the Nation but are
There contracts available for you to grow it and to be able to produce it that it kind of depends on the area and the year where of course most Growers are going to demand this if they’re going to grow this as a crop there’s a big risk involved potentially of growing
This and they want to know that they’re going to be able to get something out of it at the end of the day they don’t want to grow it and then have bales of fiber sitting on their field because somebody doesn’t show up to pick it up because
They don’t have a contract the market what that’s really going to be in your area is really important whether it’s going to be fiber seed or CBD type hemp and again does it displace something in the market we think it actually augments the market I think if it’s going to
Displace anything we’re kind of targeting petroleum we don’t see this as deac other crops we think it as supplementing other crops and I was at the recent uh multi-state meeting again uh for the the s184 down in North Carolina this just last week and we got
A go tour a facility in the area there um that’s doing some really great things for fiber production they work on cotton and hemp and they’re showing how you can integrate those together to yield um some of the best quality products so that’s really exciting to see that kind
Of thing develop um and we’re going to see more of that in in the coming years I’m sure how big is the market that’s still an open question for everybody but the market potential is actually huge a lot of people was said now if you look
At actual costs this is what I get for um the most recent data as of yesterday for corn soybean and wheat these are if you’re going to grow an acre this is what you might expect if you have a high yielding a very very good crop depending
On where you are in the country this is what the price is and this is what you can expect per acre um to get as Revenue um if you’re growing hemp these are the typical prices the last two years um for floral hemp we’re actually up to about
$3 half dollar a pound again it was down to less than year two years ago but it has rebounded that over supply has been consumed and there’s actually a demand again for this and we’re back around the three three and a half $4 a pound you know if you if
You have these price points all of a sudden this becomes quite attractive from The Profit perspective now the question is profit includes Revenue versus your input so you have to consider what your inputs are what is it going to take to grow the crop um this
Is what you could get for your gross um Revenue but you still have to consider what your inputs are going to be and that’s going to depend on on the particular area and even the particular farm so one of the ways that we’re also trying to help with this is looking at
This broad picture again Oregon State University with Jeff Steiner as a lead put together this sustainable a systems Grant where we’re looking at how do we set up a bioeconomy based on hemp in the west coast and we’re very excited to see how this is moving forward and information that we’re generating that
Will lead to some answers to some of those questions I’m going to skip because we’re out of time just highlight here again there’s many opport unities here and some challenges all looking at varieties available pesticide issues Harvest equipment manufacturing and really what are the market opportunities if we have great markets great
Opportunities all of these things as potential issues go away because somebody will find a way to resolve them so with that I’m going to close with the acknowledgements a lot of people are involved in these projects U very excited to be involved with them um and
I’m going to turn to questions at this point we have a couple of them I see so if I understand right by here I should hold these up okay how old were the seedlings when transplanted um we typically transplant them between 21 and 25 days old
We don’t like them to grow longer than 28 days they tend to get too big the big issue is we want to avoid uh seeing uh The Roots get bound up in the seedling pot um that’s a really critical issue you have to make sure that they don’t
Get root bound and as long as they’re not root bound they seem to do okay um but yeah that’s that’s our typical age we’ve tried planting them earlier when they were even younger um it’s a little bit more difficult with our equipment to do so uh we did do that for the sack
Grant we put them in these basically it’s a Pete cup that we put soil in um again we see the same issue with the roots you don’t see a Tap Root you see branching Roots instead I think having to go through that uh cup is an issue so
Direct seating seems to um eliminate some of these problems with I don’t know if it’s a problem it’s just a difference in how they grow right so and again it may depend on what you’re targeting and what your your ultimate end goals are at the same time the The Roots branching
They they tend to then focus on the upper 12 to 18 inches of the surface of the of the soil where the root zone is so you need to consider your watering uh how your water availability if that’s the case um if you’re irrigating it’s probably not much of a deal but if
You’re relying on ground water then that might be an issue in terms of how well the plants will perform um did you have any issues with seed quality I’m not sure exactly what issues that might be what you mean there um the results I mean from if you’re
Talking about the results from the the the varieties oh low germination of moldy okay that’s a good good question thank you for following up we um have not had a problem with moly seeds at all um in our area uh everything that we got has been very high quality uh the low
Germination we have seen with some of the germ plasm collection accessions some of those are collected from feral populations around the nation um which basically it’s weed growing as a weed if you want to laugh at that um and as a result for those populations to survive
Long term having a seed bank in the soil is important the varieties that are grown purpose f for production they typically have a germination rate uh exceeding 85% everybody claims that we typically see they’re in the 90s 95 some of them are almost 99 or 100% we you
Know out of a thousand out of a thousand seeds you see maybe one that doesn’t germinate some of those other accessions 3% germination is what we saw in one of them it was really really low um it just it kind of it depends on what the sources and what exactly varieties or
Accessions you’re talking about and for protein quantification we we actually have um uh we’re developing a new method for that the way that we have done this in the past is kind of the standard you measure carbon and nitrogen using combustion using a standard lab um you
Know then you multiply that times a factor that supposedly tells you accurately what your protein is even though it’s you know that factor is the same for every single seed across every single species I don’t think so but that’s what everybody does um we are developing instead a method based on uh
A much smaller scale that we can use one seed for um and so we can get actually the protein content in an individual seed um it’s using more standard uh what I would call biochemical based approaches and students in my lab are optimizing that right now working with
Phil Bates our um partner here at WC who does lipid analysis and they’ve developed this method for other oil seeds and we’re adapting it for hemp right now um we hopefully will have that available within the next couple of months up and running and then by the
Later this year we we hope to have our first paper out where we showed data for the seed yield um for these different crops and the method will be in that as well um next question is there any data of varieties of higher tpping diversity um in our effort we are kind
Of just looking at that right now um so I can’t answer that question yet hopefully within the next year or so we’ll have some information uh but there is a big diversity if you just look in the literature from what people have found um but in terms of if there’s a
Higher diversity within varieties I don’t know the answer to that and what do I think the best hemp types are for Washington all of them is the short answer um CBD hemp grows exceptionally well here you know Washington and Oregon were the Hub of the black market marijuana industry for decades uh
Varieties were grown and developed here for that all you got to do is knock out the THC which people have done in those same varieties perform excellently here in the area we get great yields um the day length is perfect for most of these we’re at the northern latitude we even
Better than Oregon in a lot of cases we get higher yields um and the quality is very very good for CBD type hemp or CBG or CBC or cbdv all of these other varieties that we’re people are developing in our area um fiber grows exceptionally well as well and the grain
Varieties do well the grain we think is going to be really good for our Dryland areas um near where I grow where I where I currently live in in pulman we have the Poo uh we get 22 to 24 inches of rain each year at the right time of year
To help support hemp uh we and we have a couple of Growers that have grown here and they’ve got really really good results uh using dryland farming the central part of the state it’s kind of a desert uh rain is a lot lower levels it
Ranges between 4 to 11 inches in a lot of places but we have the Columbia river that runs through and they have high availability of irrigation water so you know if you if you want to use irrigation you can grow hemp really really well in the central part of the
State um if you want to grow it without irrigation the northern and eastern and western parts of the state um are very suited for that so and do most fiber folk in Washington irrigate their entire Fields well the answer is that there’s not very many fiber folk in Washington to be honest
With you um we’ve kind of been leading that effort with our partners and um yes in the central part we do irrigate because I I just answered why because there’s not enough rain but on the eastern part of the state we don’t have to irrigate and they don’t irrigate at
All in fact there’s no irrigation availability in Eastern Washington we don’t have any kind of um River uh water supply in the area where we really rely on snow pack um charging the soil and then rain that comes at the right time of year I think that’s all of the questions
That we have unless anybody has another one I can stick on for another minute I think we went over a little bit thank you for those that stuck with it I hope this was interesting yeah thank you very much David this has been a production of Cornell University on the web at cornell.edu