How Much Water Do Hemp Plants Need

Hemp, the non-psychoactive course of cannabis, has a complicated history in the Usa.

Many of the founding fathers grew hemp and praised the establish as a cash crop, and then in 1937 a tax constabulary essentially made the found illegal. During World War II the U.S. authorities changed the rules once more, begging farmers to abound hemp in a propaganda moving picture called Hemp for Victory.

And now, after decades of redesignation as an illegal controlled substance, Colorado farmers are leading the style in some other major hemp improvement with the constitute's high value and possible drought tolerance taking center phase.

Although expensive, hemp grows similar Lebsock Farms in Sterling are hopeful that delivering h2o to the plants via raised beds and drip irrigation will cutting h2o utilize by minimizing evaporation.

However, researchers like Katie Russell, managing director of Colorado State University'due south Southwestern Colorado Research Center, one of multiple groups doing extensive study on hemp'southward drought tolerance, feel hemp may be getting more than credit for tolerating dry conditions than it currently deserves.

"I don't think that this is a dryland ingather for our area because nosotros do have such depression rainfall and it's very variable amongst seasons. And so, information technology could be very risky some years and could work out other years. Information technology's probably on bespeak with corn. If yous look at a perennial organization, alfalfa for instance, it would exist a water savings in comparison," says Russell.

Part of the trouble is very little research on hemp exists considering the plant was mostly off-limits to farmers and scientists until the passage of the 2014 and 2018 Farm Bills. Merely now, researchers similar Russell are complimentary to look into ways to help boost the plant'southward value and hardiness.

"I call up nosotros could actually improve hemp as a drought crop," Russell says. "I call up every bit nosotros motion forrad in the future if we're really targeting that at as a specific breeding purpose then I think we could find it could work in a lot more arid environments."

CBD, an oil extracted from hemp flowers is used in a wide variety of pop products marketed for calming, healing and wellness. Hemp fibers in the plant'southward stalk are used in items like vesture, rope and paper. Russell says regardless of the stop-use, hemp farmers may be less likely to minimize hemp's water consumption when they meet how much better the plant performs with more water.

"Nosotros're seeing larger growth habit with the higher h2o, greater stem diameter, more branches, which would likely then exist more flowers and should equal more yield. If this were a fiber system, something that really relies on high biomass, I retrieve you'd run across a pretty expert yield reduction under the lower water use scenario."

Then the variety of hemp plants currently available may non deserve the title of drought-tolerant on their own but it does announced the hemp boom is inspiring a new wave of creativity in agriculture with a focus on saving water.

Jason VonLembke, manager of the Subsurface Irrigation Efficiency Projection or SIEP, says the hype around hemp is pulling water-saving irrigation techniques out of the shadows and into the mainstream spotlight. "Ane of the cool things is that it does describe younger people in who are kind of open to these technologies and things similar that. So, if anything, you might run across a spring in people using efficient irrigation."

And studying water efficiency in agriculture is exactly what VonLembke and the SIEP team practice at their research facility in Kersey, Colorado, where the master focus is 82 acres of subsurface drip irrigation. This is a organization rarely used in Colorado that pumps water from a well through a filtration system that can add nutrients to the water before delivering it directly to the roots of rows of plants planted on mounds.

"If y'all're irrigating with flood irrigation your crop is absorbing about 45% and the other 55% of that h2o is either runoff or evaporates. If you're using a pivot circumvolve your efficiency is around 80%. So, what nosotros're trying to practise with drip irrigation is become those efficiencies up to 95-98%," VonLembke explains.

SIEP researchers are growing hemp because it does well with subsurface drip irrigation and its value makes the high toll of switching to the water-efficient drip system more than feasible. "The system is expensive. It costs about $1,500 to $one,700 an acre. We have been growing alfalfa here for the last three or four seasons and the return on the investment of alfalfa, which prior to hemp was what we believed to be ane of the most valuable greenbacks crops because you can get about $130 to $140 a ton for that. Compare that to hemp, we can sell our hemp bloom at $35 a pound."

SIEP is studying other less expensive, non-traditional forms of irrigation that too work well with hemp.

Their mobile drip system is a more accessible water-saving design that uses a traditional pivot irrigation system, the type you come across on well-nigh farmland working its way across the field watering crops from above, but this one has hoses or baste lines fastened to each nozzle delivering water straight to the ground around the plants every bit it moves. "I'thou so excited about this. I recollect this is 1 of the immediate answers," says VonLembke.

A working irrigation pin sitting unused amongst the drip-irrigated hemp crop shows how confident Lebsock Farms is that subsurface irrigation will be worth the investment.

An 60 minutes and a half away in Sterling, Colorado the Lebsock hemp farm is testing irritating hemp with baste on a major scale.

David Lebsock and his family are growing a thousand acres of hemp for CBD. Their entire crop is irrigated on a subsurface drip system. They're hoping drip volition save them 40% to 50% of their water.

David Lebsock says another benefit of drip irrigation is it allows Lebsock to use more of their land. "See where the pivot actually ends correct in that location? All that from here to there was non-irrigated but now we're able to use it as production." The Lebsock team believes they are still using less h2o fifty-fifty though they're using more than of their infinite. "I mean, right now we haven't watered for the last week," says Lebsock. "Does that constitute wait like it'due south droughty? Not at all."

With some farmers confident in hemp's water-saving value and others unsure the constitute'southward electric current drought tolerance isn't being oversold, all parties are anxiously pending the new data and irrigation related discoveries uncovered with each hemp harvest, discoveries that are undoubtedly changing the Colorado agriculture industry every bit a whole.

Connecting the Drops is produced in partnership between Water Didactics Colorado and Rocky Mountain Community Radio stations. This series would not exist possible without the generous support of CoBank, a national cooperative bank helping to provide financing solutions for rural water systems.