Hemp, Hemp, Hooray for Young Farming Leader
Rachel Berry's Farm Aid talk cited challenges for beginning farmers, hemp growers
A Young Farmer’s Strong Fiber
Rachel Berry was a logical choice to participate last Saturday in a panel at the Farm Aid Festival focused on the crucial need for a new generation of young farmers. Rachel, one of many young growers who started out with no farming experience, was in her 20s in 2012 when she started Prairie Renaissance Farm in Princeton, Illinois with a focus on permaculture, regenerative agriculture and heirloom foods.
Rachel spoke fluently about the challenges and farm community support that marked her early days as a farmer. But she had a broader agenda in her panel remarks. That’s because Rachel early on became a strong advocate of industrial hemp production and removing nearly century-old prohibitions under federal law that lumped hemp (a cannabis plant) in with marijuana — even though hemp contains only microscopic amounts of THC, the compound in marijuana that makes people high.
Industrial hemp advocates decried the restrictions, citing a long history of hemp growing in America and the extraordinary utility of the fibrous plant, which can be used to make paper, clothing, textiles, animal feed, plant-based plastic, and food products such as hemp seed, hemp milk, hemp protein powder, and hemp oil. Advocates also say that hemp has major environmental benefits for soil health, combating climate change and protecting water resources.
This message finally started to get through to lawmakers in the past decade, resulting in provisions in the 2018 federal Farm Bill that allowed for industrial hemp production under state or federal regulation. Shortly thereafter, Rachel founded and became CEO of the Illinois Hemp Growers Association.
In her Farm Aid remarks, Rachel called on attendees to support the proposed federal Industrial Hemp Act of 2023, which cut remaining red tape hindering the production of the crop.
One way that I want everybody in this room to really help is to advocate for the Industrial Hemp Act of 2023. There is an online platform. What this would do is it would create a distinction between cannabinoids like our CBD products or medicinal types of hemp, separated from the fiber and the grain so that it's easier for farmers to become fiber and grain farmers. That's when we’re gonna see the building materials, the plastics, the regeneration of our soil, the pulling of carbon out of the air, that's going to come from the fiber and the grain. So we need more farmers, we need more support, not just from people in our community, but from our government.
We’ll have more takeaways from Rachel’s comments after this brief message.
Thank You, Farm Aid
This newsletter wraps up Local Food Forum’s coverage of the 2023 Farm Aid Festival, held Saturday, September 23 in Noblesville, Indiana. I want to thank Farm Aid for providing press credentials to this young publication that is uniquely focused on the issues affecting small farmers and local food communities that have benefited so much over the past 38 years from the non-profit organization’s work.
Our Farm Aid coverage has a permanent home on the new Local Food Forum website, launched last week. Please visit to find the stories, and I’d greatly appreciate your feedback and suggestions for making it better and more useful for our community.
Here is the rundown of the previous Farm Aid Coverage:
Farm Aid: Legends Lineup with Stunning Cameo (about the Festival concert that included an unannounced appearance by Bob Dylan): September 24
Helping Mother Nature Fighting Back in 2023 (about the Farm Aid news conference and the strong statements by entertainer/Farm Aid co-founder Neil Young): September 25
Farm Aid's Fired-Up Grass-Roots Advocacy (about Indiana regenerative livestock farmer Greg Gunthorp’s powerful call to transform our food system): September 26
This Legislator is a Local Food Leader (about Illinois state Rep. Sonya Harper, chair of state House Agriculture & Conservation Committee and advocate for small farmers and urban agriculture): September 27.
More Wisdom from Rachel Berry
I was raised in the suburbs of Chicago. I did not grow up with farming in my background. I wanted to be a doctor, I studied medicine, I went to school for that for a while and decided that wasn't really where I wanted to be. I was studying psych a lot and noticing a lot of people needing to get their hands in the soil for better mental health. I wanted to be a farmer because I wanted to contribute to that to myself and to my community.
I don't know if there was an “a-ha” moment. There were many moments strung together that eventually it was unavoidable that this is where I wanted to be. As a first-generation farmer, I didn't have that family pushing me to do this. So a lot of it was just my own tinkering, meeting with farmers in my community, visiting their farms and learning more about farming. Seeing the kind of work that these farms are doing in our community, and I just wanted to be part of that.
[Asked if she faced any barriers as a beginning farmer.] Access to land. It was really, really hard to get a farm to actually grow on. Any farming skill, any growing skill, even like growing a tomato, that was new for me. So all of the skills and finding support networks, that took work too. There's so much to do when you are a first-generation farmer, and it's not in your family. There's many, many steps and many routes you have to explore to get that support that you need.
[How she decided to focus on hemp.] I did not want to be a corn and soybean grower, like all of the other farmers around me. I did not want to contribute to degradation of our soil, of our water, of our watersheds. I just wanted something completely different. So as I'm scraping my brain researching, what can I grow? How can I be a farmer? How can I contribute to my community?
It was hemp. So all of the things that hemp can do, that was the catalyst for me. That is what made it real to me that I could be a farmer. It's a new-old crop the United States. We did grow hemp way, way back, we paid our taxes with it and everything. Prohibition came along and hemp and cannabis both went away. When I learned that I can use hemp to remediate my soil, remediate erosion, I can use it to feed my animals, my lifestyle, my family, I can use it to build on my farm. That is the crop for me.
I had local farmers, local food farmers, really in my corner. When they realized that I was an eager young beginning farmer that wanted to learn anything from them, they were like, girl, come over. We got jobs for you, we got things for you to check out. We got you. So I had a lot of support from local farmers.
And then from here in Indiana, the Midwest Hemp Council. They have been an amazing support and amazing group of farmers, advocates, eaters, all things. Having the support of advocates that were here advocating for hemp before me, that has been huge. I founded the Illinois Hemp Growers Association about five years into my journey.
There's so much stigma still. I'm proud to say that in Illinois, I feel like we're really fighting stigma. We're getting to places, we're talking to farmers. I don't know how many jokes I have to shrug off, laugh off about smoking a hemp wall or smoking my t-shirt. But there's a ton of stigma. Many farmers don't want anything to do with cannabis. They've been told to burn it, eradicate it, get rid of it any way that they can for decades and decades. So fighting stigma, absolutely that's a part of this work.
I do farm tours. So I have folks come out, view the hemp I'm growing that season, have legislators out. I'm an educator, by nature have been an educator for a long time. So educating about hemp is just kind of, yes, throw it in there. Let's do it. So we get around and we bring these materials, we bring these examples of things that you can feel touch, smell, experience with hemp. And when people see, they're like, “Yeah, I could see myself growing this and contributing to products like these.”
We want farmers want to see hemp wood and hemp building materials and all kinds of stuff. And then you tell them, if you have heavy metals or too many years of nitrogen or phosphorus, etc., it can remediate soil, it can keep nutrients from running into our waterways, it can cut down erosion so we're not losing all of our topsoil into waterways. And it pulls out carbon. So when you add the environmental aspect to it with all the amazing things they can do, people are very turned on to hemp.
What gives me hope is because it's new, it's exciting, it gives us a chance to just totally reimagine agriculture in this country. That's what really gives me hope. We can farm differently, we can process the materials that we need in our daily lives, cut down on cutting down trees for toilet paper. That's really what gives me the hope for the future is there's so much promise here. So we just need more farmers, more support, more processing, more manufacturing. The benefit of hemp for local economy really is real.
This Weekend’s Regional Market Schedule
Brace yourselves… Sunday is October 1. Nearly all of our region’s farmers markets are still open for the season, but the vast majority will be closed by the end of the month. Lots of delicious eats to be had, but don’t dally.