ROSEVILLE, Ill. -- Surrounded by waist-high hemp plants, Andy Huston, a sixth-generation farmer in Illinois, stopped to admire one of the ridged green leaves."I could just spend all day in my hemp field pulling weeds," Huston said.Huston planted corn and soybeans this year, about 1,100 acres
ROSEVILLE, Ill. — Surrounded by waist-high hemp plants, Andy Huston, a sixth-generation farmer in Illinois, stopped to admire one of the ridged green leaves.Huston planted corn and soybeans this year, about 1,100 acres of each, just as he has for decades. But he is depending on a far smaller 17-acre plot of hemp, newly legalized for cultivation in Illinois, to spare his struggling bottom line.
Some states had already allowed farmers to grow hemp, interpreting earlier federal provisions to allow commercial production. Other states responded with legislation allowing hemp. “People just don’t understand what hemp is,” said Jeffrey Cox, the head of Illinois’s bureau of medicinal plants, who oversaw a small hemp field at this summer’s state fair to introduce the new crop. “I had to explain that it’s not marijuana to hundreds and hundreds of people.”
Huston, who voted for President Donald Trump and intends to do so again, said he believed that the president had good intentions in his trade standoff, although like other farmers, Huston said he was frustrated and had suffered from its effects. Ann Knowles and Will Terrill, who own Prairie Smoke Herb, a hemp farm in Colchester, Illinois., said they were struggling with their first crop.
“Hemp is a wild card,” he said. “If you were going to spend $20,000, you had to be willing to lose $20,000.”
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