Hemp feedback

USDA is reopening the comment period for domestic hemp production under the interim final rule. Agricultural Marketing Service Administrator Bruce Summers: “Last October, we published the interim final rule for the production of hemp. And when we did that, we said that we would give stakeholders an additional opportunity to provide comments on their experience growing hemp this current season in 2020. We are extending the comment period because we wanted to give stakeholders the opportunity to give us comments based on a year of production. So we put the new rules into place at the beginning of the 2020 growing season. And we wanted to have comments that were able to rely on the experiences in producing and testing and marketing the hemp after a full growing season.” Comments on public experiences with hemp are due by October 8th. “Written comments should be submitted to the federal rulemaking portal at regulations.gov. And those comments are public comments and they will all be posted publicly for review. Every comment that we receive, we read, we analyze and respond to. And so these comments are really important to ending up with a final rule that is responsive to the needs of the industry and complies with the statute that Congress gave us. “First, read our request for comment. There's quite a bit of information there and then do their analysis to prepare their responses.” Nearly 5000 comments on hemp production were received during a previous comment period.