Hemp

Sowing: Hemp is a frost-hardy annual, and its production practices differ sharply by end use. Grain and fiber hemp is typically sown and managed at field scale with conventional equipment such as a grain drill, while cannabinoid hemp is instead started from feminized seed and transplanted into rows, often on black plastic with drip irrigation, spaced anywhere from about one foot up to six feet apart depending on the planting.

Support and scale: Cannabinoid production is far more labor-intensive and is managed more like a specialty or vegetable crop than a broadacre one, reflecting the wider row spacing and hand attention that flower quality demands.

Insect pests, weeds, and diseases are recognized as major ongoing challenges for hemp growers, enough that insect management, weed management, and disease management rank among the top research priorities identified by hemp programs working with the crop.

Harvest: Grain is combined directly from the plant using a grain combine, while stalks grown for fiber are cut and baled with haying equipment. Cut stalks must first go through a retting process before baling, which helps separate the bast fiber from the woodier hurd inside the stem.

Drying: Flower grown for cannabinoids is handled differently: plants are cut by hand at the base, commonly with a machete, then hung to dry in a barn before further processing or extraction.

Culinary: Hemp seed, or grain, is processed into hemp hearts and used in foods such as granola and hemp milk, and hempseed oil pressed from the seed is used as a cooking oil and in dietary supplements.

Fiber and industrial: The stalk yields two distinct fiber types, bast and hurd, which are manufactured into rope, paper, construction materials, carpeting, textiles, insulation, animal bedding, and bioplastics; seed oil is also used in paints, solvents, and lubricants, and leftover seed cake from oil pressing is fed to animals as a protein supplement.

Flower and medicinal: Flower is harvested for smoking and for extracting cannabinoids such as CBD, and various oriental and Asian cultures historically used hemp's seed, fiber, and cannabinoid-bearing resin in traditional medicine for thousands of years.

Hemp is considered an ancient cultivated plant that originated in Central Asia, with cultivation records tracing back to China around 2700 BC before it spread across Asia and reached Europe roughly 2000 to 2200 years ago. It later became a widely grown commodity fiber crop in colonial North America, where farmers were at times mandated to cultivate it, a role it held into the mid-18th century United States before demand declined and 20th-century regulation curtailed its production.