This farmer had a million-dollar hemp crop — until South Carolina bulldozed it – By Chris Dixon (Washington Post) / Jan 11 2020
HARLEYVILLE, S.C. —After Hurricane Dorian battered his farm in September, John Trenton Pendarvis faced a costly decision. Dorian’s winds had blasted the hemp he had planted in early summer. On one particular 10-acre field and its nearly mature crop, he had already spent over $75,000 for licensing, seeds and labor — a sum that he hoped to recoup by selling the post-harvest hemp oil and flowers for several million dollars.
But the flattened plants were not his only problem. Because of water issues, he had used acreage not officially permitted for hemp by the state agriculture department. He called the agency to ask whether he should hire a crew to manually prop up the 25,000 plants. “They said, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing,’ ” he remembers.
He got a different response several days later when a phalanx of law enforcement officers arrived, handcuffing and arresting him for illegal hemp cultivation, then bulldozing his crop. “It must have been 30 of them coming from everywhere,” Pendarvis said recently, surveying the crushed remains on his farm northwest of Charleston. “Now it’s just all rotted up.”
As his case wends through the courts — despite South Carolina not yet prescribing a penalty for what it considers a misdemeanor crime — Pendarvis has become emblematic of the hurdles that farmers face in growing a crop legalized through the 2018 federal farm bill. Laws are evolving across the conservative South, where hemp grows well thanks to the warm weather and fertile soil.
Hemp is outwardly indistinguishable from marijuana and smells the same when burned. Difficulty in telling the two apart is causing headaches throughout law enforcement. South Carolina, for one, requires farmers to be licensed and their fields approved. Crops must be tested to keep THC, the psychoactive compound found in marijuana, at 0.3 percent or less of the plant’s dry weight.
“There are no manuals yet. Laws vary,” noted Billy Styles, a North Carolina hemp farmer who consults in both Carolinas and across western states. “I tell farmers to abide by the law — and understand it’s moving.”
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