Industrial Hemp Podcast
This week on the Hemp Show, we're revisiting some of the folks we met during our National Hemp Tour of 2021.
Five years ago this summer the Industrial Hemp Podcast hit the road to map the industry as it was then. Hemp farmers, processors and manufacturers were few and far between at the time.
One of the stops we made in the summer of 2021 was South Bend Industrial Hemp near Great Bend, Kansas, where Melissa Nelson, her husband Aaron Baldwin, and brother-in-law Rich Baldwin had recently installed a decortication machine that processed raw hemp bales into usable streams of fiber and hurd.
Melissa's vision for growth has always been about building a resilient regional supply chain. South Bend Industrial Hemp developed a growers group with the intention of educating local farmers to grow the crop.
Five years later, the team at South Bend works with a group of 27 growers across Kansas, producing around 7,000 acres of hemp this season.
"Our farmers are everything," Nelson said. "At the end of the day, we couldn't do this without them. And the responsibility that we feel because of the trust that they put in us is immeasurable. I carry that weight very heavily on my shoulders and it's very important to me that they have success."
Listen to the whole show to hear how South Bend has grown over the past five years — the challenges, the successes, the learning curves and much more.
South Bend Industrial Hemp
Lancaster Farming
Jungmaven
IND Hemp
Forever Green / KP4 Hemp Cutter
Kings Agriseeds