Episode Details

On this week's hemp podcast, Lancaster Farming talks to cover crop coach Steve Groff, who was hoping to get one of those multilevel pull-behind sickle bar mowers to cut his hemp this year.

But those machines are in demand and he wasn't able to get one in time, so he did the best he could.

"What we did this year," he said, "is just farmer innovation."

He had his local machine shop mount a sickle bar cutter on the front of his tractor. In the back, he had a pulled standard rear mount sickle bar cutter. With that setup, he could make two cuts, high and low, with each pass of the tractor.

"When you cut a hemp stalk in 2- or 3-foot sections, it makes it easier for the haymaking equipment already in existence" to get the hemp ready for the retting and bailing, he said.

Groff has 50 acres of fiber hemp on his farm this year, one of the largest stands of industrial hemp in Pennsylvania this growing season.

Once the hemp is cut, it needs to be raked, retted and bailed.

Because Groff planted his hemp into a no-till cover crop system, he was concerned about losing the thick layer of cover crop biomass covering his fields if he were to use a rotary rake or bar rake on the crop.

The cover crop biomass would end up in the harvested hemp, which he said would be bad for the decortication process — the processor would have to remove the debris before processing the hemp.

"But it's also bad for me as a farmer who values the soil being covered," he said.

Groff had an idea. What if he used a hay merger?

"I thought this could be good because it's not as aggressive the way it could pick up the hemp," he said. "I could run it high enough off the ground to get the hemp lifted up and moved, but not pick up my cover crop."

Groff was able to trial two different hay merger models on the hemp at his farm. The first was made by Reiter, an Austrian manufacturer, and the other was an Anderson merger from Canada.

He was happy with the results.

The next step for Groff is to bail the hemp. For this he's using a round baler designed for bailing hemp and made by McHale, an Irish company.

Groff is optimistic about the hemp industry in Pennsylvania, but knows there's still so much to learn.

He compared it to building a bridge.

"The way they're designed, they build from each end and meet in the middle and hopefully meet perfectly," he said.

The farmers are figuring out how to grow it, while the processors are trying to figure out how to process it, he said.

"But we need to be talking to one another so that we hit in the middle."

Cedar Meadow Farm https://cedarmeadow.farm/

News Nugs, with ChatGPT summaries

Kansas farmers rushed to grow hemp when it became legal, but now they're ditching ithttps://www.kcur.org/news/2023-09-01/kansas-farmers-rushed-to-grow-hemp-when-it-became-legal-but-now-theyre-ditching-it

Kansas has seen a steep decline in hemp farming as CBD oil production wanes. In 2019, over 200 farmers joined the state's hemp program, but this year, only 41 secured licenses. The drop in demand for CBD has led to a shift towards other hemp products like fiber for clothing and grain for animal feed. While the CBD market has slowed, there's optimism about the potential of these alternative hemp markets in Kansas, with some businesses already thriving in fiber and grain production.

Seeing a bright future for hemp in NYS

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