Learning to Grow Hemp for Fiber in Connecticut

FREEDOM GERARDO IS CREATING SPACES FOR PEOPLE TO EXPLORE FARMING HEMP AS PART OF A REGENERATIVE, REGIONAL FIBER ECONOMY.

Photo by Lindsay Skedgell

Farmer Freedom Gerardo stood in front of his one-acre experimental plot of hemp. On a Saturday morning at the CT Agriculture Experiment Station farm in Griswold, I joined a group of farmers and plant enthusiasts for a skillshare lesson on farming hemp for fiber. Gerardo is the co-owner of SEAmarron Farmstead in Danbury. During the CBD-growing boom of 2019-2021, he grew CBD cannabis, and this season has been his first growing hemp for fiber. He tells participants about what he’s learned through trial and error, as well as the pushback he has received. In April, he published a piece in CT Mirror about the regulations requiring hemp growers to complete background checks.

Gerardo started off the class saying, “There are 25,000 uses for hemp. We know one of them: CBD. So we have 24,999 more uses to explore.” The plants are neon green, thin, and long, standing between five and twelve feet tall. The field was planted in May, and now in September, we were gathered to learn how to harvest it for fiber use.

Let me address the question we all have when we start learning about hemp for fiber: Is it weed

Here, the word “hemp” is used for a cannabis plant with a THC content that falls below the 0.3% threshold. Yes, it is the same species of plant that gives us flowering buds. They share characteristics like the timelessly symbolic star-shaped leaf, and the zingy smell of the flower buds. But rather than growing flowers, the goal of growing fiber is to grow a long stem. When you break apart these hemp stems, the fiber inside is long and strong. Hemp plants can grow over twelve feet tall, all stem with a spiky little seed cluster on top. At the skillshare, Gerardo invited participants to walk into the hemp field. It felt like walking through bamboo, or a more whimsical corn maze. No it didn’t smell like a field of weed. Only when we touched the fuzzy seed pods and pressed them right up to our noses did we get that familiar smell. 

As Gerardo spoke about his experience growing hemp in CT, we watched another farmer drive the tractor along the field, mowing the stalks down with a sickle mower. It’s important to cut the stalks down low, to preserve the lengths of fiber within the stem. 

Trying to learn about cannabis as a plant is an interesting experience. Stigmatization, oppressive legal frameworks, and various cultural scrutiny have led to misinformation and obliterated centuries of knowledge. Fear around cannabis has stifled exploration of its uses. It’s a plant. It’s extremely useful. Yes I do appreciate smoking weed. But I also love yarn and people-plant relationships and bioremediation. 

“I am a soil protector and water protector, and hemp is right there with those concepts,” Gerardo says. “As soon as I rebuilt my relationship with the soil, I knew that I had to do everything I could to protect the soil.…We need to switch from monocropping, extractive economics and farming, to regenerative economics and farming.”

One of his goals with this project is to create spaces for people to learn about hemp. “Just having the conversation,” he says, “moving the needle little by little,” will help people begin exploring hemp’s possibilities for the Northeast.

Around the world, hemp has historically been used for its fibers, for fabric, rope, animal feed and bedding, building materials, the list goes on. People like to theorize that the US Constitution was drafted on hemp paper because it was such a common material at the time. Colonizers in the Northeast in the 1600s required all farmers to grow hemp. It was not made federally illegal in the US until 1937, as the US ramped up its anti-immigrant campaigns (not to get too in the weeds here, but it’s worth noting that nylon, the first synthetic fabric, was also invented in the late 1930’s). So material innovations of the last century have been explored and built upon without using hemp as an ingredient. Industries have been established in an extractive way, but there is space to reimagine where we can take fiber production. 

One of the biggest challenges is building the infrastructure to process the fiber. Like linen and cotton, after hemp has been harvested it must be processed. The inner core of the stem needs to be separated from the outer stalk, a process called decortication. Gerardo compares it to the kelp industry of the Northeast, especially CT, where kelp growers have built a market and infrastructure for kelp grown in the Long Island Sound over the last decade. “My ideal situation is that hemp is grown locally and we have an ecosystem of hemp farmers,” He says. “We can develop a market in the region. Not just Connecticut but this region. CT, MA, RI, PA, NY.” The products he is interested in using his hemp for include the building material hempcrete and animal bedding.

The training program Solid Ground, through UCONN’s agriculture extension, holds free farming skill shares and workshops on different topics throughout the year. Gerardo and Solid Ground will hold one more skill share on processing the hemp, on October 5th. Learn more here or signing up through their newsletter, s.uconn.edu/hemp4fiber.

Additional thoughts: 

Something that is very funny to me, is that if your hemp “goes hot,” that is, produces more than .3% THC… CT regulations require you to burn it down. I texted a farmer friend about it and then felt bad because he clearly didn’t feel like riffing off of the idea.