Researchers and a handful of farmers team up to develop industrial hemp for Louisiana
December 18, 2023
In St. Landry Parish, where soybeans, rice and sugarcane typically flourish, a new crop is rising high above one field.
On a 12-acre plot in the south Louisiana parish, Pat Deshotels and Matthew Indest have grown hemp three times, but this crop — standing thick in the field with tall, slender stalks leading to bunches of green leaves — is their most successful.
“This is it,” Indest said, gesturing toward a 10-foot plant rising out densely planted hemp. “I think if we can show this growth here, people will be interested.”
Once a staple crop grown for fiber, food, oil and other uses, hemp disappeared from American fields for decades until federal law once again permitted its production five years ago. Now, a handful of Louisiana growers and a team of researchers at the LSU AgCenter are working to figure out how this plant fits in the state’s agricultural industry.
“There has been no research on hemp for 40 years,” said AgCenter researcher Babitha Jampala. “So, we are picking up from scratch.”
Jampala, whose expertise is in molecular breeding, leads the AgCenter Industrial Hemp Working Group, which began in 2019, to test which varieties of hemp fare well in Louisiana and to develop best management practices for the crop.
Matthew Indest shows the seeds that lie within a hemp flower at his hemp farm in St. Landry Parish. Photo by Kyle Peveto
Hemp in the U.S.
Hemp was grown to supply fiber for textiles in North America as early as 1645, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. By the 1700s, cultivation of hemp spread to the South, but it never became a major crop because of increased cotton production and the importation of cheaper fibers.
In 1937, the Marijuana Tax Act discouraged hemp production by requiring all hemp growers to register with the federal government to limit the production of marijuana. While marijuana and hemp share a genus and species, Cannabis sativa, hemp contains a negligible amount of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive compound found in much higher percentages in marijuana varieties.
Production of hemp in the U.S. peaked in 1943 and ’44 when the government encouraged farmers to grow the crop to supply rope and cords during World War II, according to the USDA ERS. The last remnant of the American hemp industry hung on in Wisconsin until 1958.
Hemp officially became illegal when Cannabis sativa was added to the federal Controlled Substances Act in 1970. The 2018 Farm Bill removed legal barriers to grow the crop, and Louisiana created a structure to regulate growing the crop in 2019. The Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry licenses hemp growers and works with them to ensure the plants contain no more than 0.3% THC.
Growing hemp in Louisiana
At an informational meeting about growing hemp soon after its legalization, Pat Deshotels noticed Matthew Indest taking detailed notes. Deshotels, a conservation biologist and owner of La Bonne Terre Resources, struck up a conversation with Indest, who had earned a doctorate studying agricultural sciences and focused on cotton breeding at LSU in 2015.
On land they lease in St. Landry Parish, the pair tried growing hemp for cannabidiol, or CBD, which could be sold for health supplements packaged as oils, creams, capsules and other delivery methods. After two years and little luck, they took a break for one growing season.
“We were growing (hemp) CBD varieties, and the market was just saturated,” Indest said.
This year, they partnered with a newly formed business, Delta Agro Fiber Solutions, a company aiming to develop a Louisiana hemp industry in part to create building materials such as hempcrete, which can be poured like concrete or formed into blocks. Indest chose a variety developed for the two types of fiber that hemp can produce, the hurd fiber from the inside of the stalks and the bast fiber that surrounds the stem.
They experimented with all aspects of planting. Then the summer turned hot and dry. Hemp, which is known to “hate getting its feet wet,” Deshotels said, thrived where they irrigated.
Indest monitors their plants regularly to test THC levels. They walk a fine line between raising a thriving crop and “getting hot,” or testing too high, Deshotels said.
In late October, after testing the crop, they received an approval from LDAF to harvest within a 30-day window. With little hemp-focused farming implements available, they are experimenting with different methods of mechanical harvesting and hand-harvesting smaller plots.
Patrick Deshotels (foreground) inspects a stalk of hemp, while Matthew Indest cuts down a hemp plant. Photo by Kyle Peveto
A future for hemp?
In 2022, according to USDA statistics, only 20 acres of hemp were planted in Louisiana. The growers planting the crop now envision an industry similar to that of cotton.
“I saw it as an opportunity,” said Deshotels while checking the crop in October. “And in my life, I’ve seen a lot of opportunities. This looked like one that I would be disappointed if I didn’t jump on it.”
Hemp proponent Brian Bolyer from Coushatta in Red River Parish owns Okhish Mound Farm and is a member of the National Hemp Growers Cooperative advisory board.
“We’ve always made stuff out of this plant, whether it be paper or clothes or rope or canvas. Henry Ford was the first one to make plastics out of it,” Bolyer said.
Last year Bolyer partnered with a landowner to experiment with growing hemp for carbon sequestration. Because hemp grows so quickly, it stores a large amount of atmospheric carbon, and farmers can sell carbon credits to trading firms. Bolyer and his partner harvested 1,700 pounds, he said, and transported it to Dama Bioplastics in Colorado. He called the first crop a “proof of concept.”
Both Bolyer and Indest communicate with Jampala and the AgCenter hemp team as they research solutions for the nascent hemp enterprise, but they have no formal cooperation agreement.
Next steps
Before industrial hemp acreage can grow in Louisiana, reliable varieties must be found, and an infrastructure must develop to process the harvest. The few farmers growing hemp for fiber this year must transport their crops to other states to process it.
“It’s like the chicken and the egg,” Jampala said. “Which comes first? We don’t have enough acres, so processors don’t want to set anything up in Louisiana. Farmers don’t want to grow it because they don’t know where the crop will go or how much they are going to earn on it.”
Delta Agro Fiber Solutions co-founder Joe Strong said he and his company’s investors plan to purchase some hemp processing machinery, such as a decorticator that separates the strong, silky bast fibers used in textiles from the tougher hurd often used in the building materials Strong wishes to create.
“Then we can keep the crop and the money within the state and create the jobs and show that this crop is capable,” Strong said.
This October Jampala planted a crop of hemp at the AgCenter Doyle Chambers Central Research Station in Baton Rouge after harvesting the spring-planted variety trial in September. She thinks the varieties she is testing will grow more easily in cooler months, and soon she hopes to begin breeding varieties especially for Louisiana.
“Our state is a microclimate,” she said. “We have heat, we have moisture, we have humidity. And because of that humidity and heat, we have high insect and pest pressure. We are trying to see which ones are growing. And then from there, we’ll start selecting our parents and start making crosses.”
While they have made great progress through their own research and work, Deshotels and Indest know that cooperating with other growers and researchers is the fastest way to reach their goal of building a hemp industry in the state.
“I’ve learned so much, and I really look forward to the future,” Deshotels said. “We’ve done well with it. But it comes down to partnering up with the right people.”
Kyle Peveto is the editor of Louisiana Agriculture. This article appears in the fall 2023 issue of Louisiana Agriculture magazine.