Spanish Fork • Jud Harward’s first hemp crop dangles from his hay barn rafters, drying as it saturates the air with an eyebrow-raising cannabis aroma. Though he hasn’t sold much of it yet, the Utah County farmer is proud of how his 10-acre experiment turned out. Paging through pre-harvest […]
Though he hasn’t sold much of it yet, the Utah County farmer is proud of how his 10-acre experiment turned out. Paging through pre-harvest cellphone photos, he shows off his neatly lined plants, some with stalks soaring above shoulder-height and crowned with what he calls the “filet mignon” of hemp buds.
Harward holds one of the roughly 220 industrial hemp licenses issued in Utah since last year, when the U.S. government cleared the way for cultivating the nonintoxicating cannabis plant.
But any get-rich-quick hopes rapidly faded, and Harward said some threw in the towel because of crop failure. Three hemp cultivators separately said it felt like they’d strayed into the agricultural “Wild West” where reliable information was hard to come by and sketchy consultants and suppliers ran rampant.