"I am shocked they wouldn't have had the monoculture varieties. What was the 20tonnes of seed they bought? it was imported, surely from a country where large scale hemp was already being grown? And forgive me for being a city boy,, but surely 20 tonnes of seed came from a large scale operation? "
1. On the mainland the problem has been the drought.
2. Also, even though we changed the laws, there wasn’t a successful transition from the trials,
3. We didn’t have the varieties that would handle the monoculture agriculture that we use nowadays.
1. Is it possible the severity of the drought wasn't fully expected?
2. If there wasn't a successful transition from small managed trial crops, as they had hoped, considering it takes 3 to 5 months in a broad-acre setting, could that also be a learned experience now being shared within the industry for future industrial hemp seed farming? After all ... pioneer crops that use different farming methods from 1937 under different "global warming" conditions would have to be looked at differently?
3. With the 9 different types of soil types in Australia which had not seen large-scale broad-acre hemp growths before is it reasonable that in 2021 after major discussions within the hemp industry that they realized that a specific seed type was required for hemp crop growth in Australia? https://csiropedia.csiro.au/soil-map-of-australia/
Thought this was an interesting article from another hemp grower about their first start-up as well. Not too much history of hemp growing in Australia prior to the ban in 1937.
* After the prohibition, could the conservative govt at the time deleted records they had on growing crops?
* Was it grown for food or fibre, prior to 1937?
"Another challenge associated with the plant is that the seed is harvested at around 20% moisture content. It must be dried to around 10% ideally within 4 hours of harvest to stop the seed from degrading and becoming useless.
Depending on the volume of seed it can be dried in the sun on racks, using a small mobile seed dryer, or a small silo with cooled compressed air being circulated.
Combine these two challenges with a lack of locally available equipment and significant time investment a lot of farmers will not persevere with the crop beyond the first-year trial.
While our first crop was not as successful as we would have hoped, local hemp seed is our hero ingredient so we will continue to experiment and bring you more unique flavours."
