HOLTWOOD, Pa. — This week on the Hemp Podcast we take a short road trip to southern Lancaster County to catch up with farmer Steve Groff.
"What we're looking at here, Eric, is a metaphor for the hemp industry. We're looking broken promises and contracts that didn't come to be," Groff said, leaning against a stack of round bales of hemp at his farm in Holtwood.
Twelve hundred round bales. Four bales wide. Three bales high. It extends into the field for about two tenths of a mile. It's covered in black tarps and you can see it from the road.
You can probably see it from space too.
Steve Groff's Great Wall of Hemp.
This is his 2025 hemp crop, roughly 80 acres of fiber hemp, cut and baled last fall.
His 2024 crop of 60 acres sits in silage bags, on the north side of the Great Wall like sleeping giants.
"You know, you add it all up, it's a million, little over a million pounds," Groff said.
And so the hemp sits.
Waiting for the processing infrastructure to be built in Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, one of the silage bags was torn open by some birds, so Groff is using the hemp from that bag as mulch for his tomato operation.
"I grow heirloom tomatoes in high tunnels, I have over 12,000 tomato plants, it's like, well, let's use up some of this hemp mulch here."
Hemp makes a great mulch, but certainly there are better uses for a million pounds of Pennsylvania-grown fiber hemp than mulch. Denim. Houses. Paper.
8 years after the 2018 Farm Bill and we're still talking about building processing infrastructure, instead of manufacturing products.
But Groff is an optimist with an eye on the future.
"I still believe in the plant and hemp and what it can do. And it looks like for the fiber and grain guys, it looks we might have a decent Farm Bill coming along here."
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A field visit with Lancaster County hemp farmer Steve Groff at Cedar Meadow Farm, where more than a million pounds of unsold hemp fiber, a four-acre seed treatment trial, and a four-inch precision planter under construction tell the story of an industry waiting on infrastructure that hasn't arrived.
This episode of the Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast features a field visit with Lancaster County hemp farmer and innovator Steve Groff at Cedar Meadow Farm in Holtwood, Pennsylvania. The conversation centers on more than a million pounds of unsold hemp fiber stacked along the farm lane — what Groff calls a metaphor for the broken promises and stalled contracts that have defined the U.S. industrial hemp industry in recent years. Across the road, blueprints for a 16,000-square-foot processing facility sit fully permitted, awaiting funding that hasn't materialized.
The visit walks through a four-acre research plot where Groff is testing five biological seed treatments against a control, replicated four times, with 2,000 colored flags tracking individual hemp seedlings from emergence to harvest. The experiment targets a long-standing mystery in industrial hemp agronomy: the gap between expected and harvested plant populations, sometimes called phantom yield loss. The episode also covers Groff's heirloom tomato operation, where unsold hemp from the 2024 crop is being used as mulch on more than 12,000 plants under high tunnels.
Additional topics include a four-inch precision hemp planter under construction with farmer-inventor Charlie Martin, designed to singulate seeds and produce uniform stands at a row spacing already standard in China and Europe but rare in the United States. The project came out of a Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture innovation grant. The episode also visits 30 acres of flax — Groff's first cash crop foray as part of the Pennsylvania Flax Project — and provides an update on the Green Decorticator, which has reached the CAD-drawing stage and is headed for commercial testing this summer, targeting plant-length long fiber for high-end textile markets.
The episode opens with a cold open from the host's backyard garden in southeastern Pennsylvania, where a truckload of hemp mulch from Groff's farm sets up the show's central question: why is a million pounds of hemp fiber being spread on tomato beds instead of woven into denim, processed into cardboard, or manufactured into bioplastics? A news segment covers the U.S. House passage of the 2026 Farm Bill, which formally separates industrial hemp from cannabinoid hemp and tightens regulation on intoxicating products, with the Senate version still pending.
