INDUSTRY
Study examines hemp consistency
Burgeoning hemp industry faces growing pains by Maria M. Lameiras for CAES News
When you buy something at the store, you have a pretty good idea of what you’re getting no matter where you buy it — a Coke is a Coke, Oreos are Oreos — and whether you buy them in Atlanta or Seattle doesn’t really change what you get. Farmers are in a similar position when they choose what to plant, but in the burgeoning field of industrial hemp, it turns out that things are much more complicated. In a study on genomic and chemical diversity in industrial hemp published in Frontiers in Plant Genetics, 2020 doctoral graduate Matthew Johnson and Associate Professor Jason Wallace found “significant naming and quality-control issues” among industrial hemp varieties available to growers. Hemp is the same species as marijuana (Cannabis sativa), and the difference is a legal one: Plants with less than 0.3% of the chemical that gives users a “high”— tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — are hemp, and anything over 0.3% THC is marijuana.
Hemp has been grown for thousands of years for its fiber and seeds. Now, the biggest money-makers are health food supplements and herbal remedies based on cannabidiol (CBD), a chemical that won’t get you high but that is just one chemical reaction away from THC. That means the relative amounts of these two chemicals is crucial for how profitable — and legal — a farmer’s crop is. “We were looking at commercial hemp accessions to see how consistent they were,” said Johnson, lead author on the paper. This consistency is important in all crops, but it is crucial in industrial hemp because of the strict regulations around it. “The main issue is that there's not much consistency among accessions,” said Wallace, faculty in the Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics And Genomics (IPBGG)
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at the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. This can spell trouble for industrial hemp producers because plants that have too little CBD are a bad investment, while plants with too much THC can get an entire field destroyed and the farmer potentially charged with criminal activity. For this study, the research team purchased 22 commercially available hemp accessions and grew them in a controlled greenhouse. They looked at both the genetics of each plant — to see how closely all the plants were related to each other — and at how much THC and CBD each produced. “We found that some accessions showed similar genetics, but a lot of them were just spread everywhere. They came from the exact same pack of seeds, but the plants almost looked like they were not related at all,” Johnson said. “This is because breeding and growing hemp has been
