In 2020, North Carolina farmers harvested over 2,000 acres of hemp.

Many farmers thought they had found the crop that would replace tobacco.

But by 2024, only 480 acres were harvested in the whole state.

That's a more than 75% collapse.

So what happened in North Carolina's hemp dream?

And what does it mean for the future?

Let's find out.

[Music] We need to really be on top of our weed management early on.

David Suchoff works directly with farmers who want to try new crops.

So after the farm bill made hemp legal in 2018, his phone would not stop ringing.

Farmers had questions, lots of them.

Could hemp replace their tobacco?

How much money could they make?

Would it really work on their land?

It's cannabis sativa, right?

Suchoff says he watched something amazing happen.

North Carolina went from no hemp farms to over 1,500 licensed growers at its peak.

It really took off because it just fits so well in the tobacco production model.

So a lot of our tobacco farmers were growing it.

They could utilize the labor that they already had.

They could utilize the equipment they had, their tobacco barns to dry it.

Many farmers saw hemp as their way out of tobacco.

They thought they'd found their new cash crop.

But that excitement didn't last very long.

The market got flooded, prices collapsed, and hemp flower that once sold for $250 a pound dropped to around $160.

Because the demand really wasn't there for that material, we saw a rapid decline.

And so it was very much a bubble.

And that bubble burst.

We're only growing this for this stem.

But there is one kind of hemp that's slowly making a comeback, fiber hemp.

But then inside the stem you also have this wooden, this woody core.

Unlike CBD hemp, which is grown for the flowers, fiber hemp is grown for the stems.

So there's a lot of excitement there.

Those stems get turned into textiles, construction materials, and other industrial products.

North Carolina historically has a very large textile industry.

There's been a lot of offshoring of that industry, but there's a lot of interest now on bringing back that industry, or at least bringing more innovation to the textile industry here in North Carolina.

And they see fiber hemp as being one aspect of bringing that innovation back.

But what about CBD hemp?

Could it make a similar comeback?

CBD demand goes up and down, but I think it's going to stay.

But a lot of that may change based off of some of the laws that may or may not be passed.

This uncertainty has both CBD and fiber hemp farmers watching what happens at both the state and federal levels.

Farmers are certainly nervous about what the regulations are going to look like in the future.

You know, hemp is the only crop that a farmer has to get an FBI background check to grow.

And so there's an added layer of bureaucracy and paperwork and costs associated with growing hemp that farmers don't have to deal with.

And that's a big turnoff for a lot of farmers.

And so farmers are keenly watching to see what will or won't come down the pipeline.

For now, hemp farming in North Carolina is a much smaller industry than it was five years ago.

But it's not dead.

And so we're really trying to get this right when it starts to bloom.

As markets stabilize and new uses develop, some farmers are betting on hemp's future, just a little bit more carefully this time.

What do you think about hemp farming in North Carolina?

Should the state do more to support farmers trying to grow this crop?

Comment and let us know below.