After their half-acre test plot started drawing too much attention — they could hear cars slowing on the gravel road, and then stopping — the family farmers put up a sign.
This is not marijuana.
They didn’t blame drivers for their confusion. A year ago, and for about 15 years before that, the patch of land along Northwest 27th Street — a couple of minutes north of the Kawasaki plant in northwest Lincoln — had been planted in brome grass.
But as this summer unfolded, the plot appeared to be packed with pot — a thick, lush crop standing taller than a man, its distinctive seven-pointed leaves drawing double-takes.
“We had lots and lots of people looking at it,†said Rosemary Reed, one of the farm’s co-owners. “And lots of people stopping.â€
Their sign elaborated:
People are also reading…
This is industrial hemp.
It was more than that. That half-acre by the road, and a similarly sized plot behind it, represented a grand experiment: Can a fifth-generation, 310-acre farm long dependent on corn and soybeans — like so many other Nebraska farms — change directions, and pursue what its owners see as an environmentally friendlier and more sustainable future?
Can it say goodbye to four-digit anhydrous ammonia bills and the need for pesticides and the volatility of commodity prices?
It’s trying, said Alice Reed, another co-owner.
“That’s what we’re working toward; we’re trying to come up with something we can plant that will make us some money and that isn’t harmful to the soil. Let’s make the planet a healthier place. Let’s grow a crop that is useful to people, and not just used for cow feed and gasoline.â€
* * *
The farmer’s daughters grew up on Stratford Avenue, in Lincoln’s Country Club neighborhood.
“My mother was adamant; she wanted her girls to be city girls,†Rosemary Reed said. “So my dad would commute and do farm work with our grandfather.â€
Their father had been born on the farm northwest of Lincoln, and before he died in 2001, he gave it to his daughters.
They weren’t ready to be farmers — yet. Rosemary Reed left Lincoln to work as a teacher at several schools in the Southwest, ended up as a news reporter at an Oregon rock music station, transitioned to TV and landed at WTTG in Washington, D.C., creating and producing its hour-long weekend news installments and working with a younger Maury Povich.
The entire news staff lost their jobs when Rupert Murdoch bought the station. So in 1987, Rosemary Reed started her own production company, creating corporate and small-business videos, documentaries and public service announcements.
Alice Reed would raise her family in the farmhouse on Northwest 27th Street, but her role as head gardener at the Sunken Gardens has kept her busy for 36 years.
Another daughter, Julie, restores and sells high-end violins in New York. Another, Jane, recently retired from the Wichita Symphony.
But the daughters didn’t need to work the land their father had given them. Decades ago, Ralph Reed had shaken hands with a neighboring farmer, allowing the man to grow and harvest and sell the yields as a sharecropper, an arrangement that has been handed down through the next generations.
Still, the sisters had plans for the future of the farm, which held so much of their family’s history. In 2009, they formed a limited liability company — Off the Grid: Reed’s Green Growers.
* * *
They were busy with their other careers, so revolutionizing traditional agriculture was just a seed of an idea at the time.
But they’d long been interested in the promise and potential of industrial hemp.
“It grows like a weed,†Alice Reed said. “It’s a great crop for Nebraska. We thought it would be a great thing for the future of farming.â€
They traced their belief to their father, she said. He knew its value. He’d show his daughters a pile of ditchweed and say, ‘This is what they grew for rope.’â€
That would stick with them — though at the time, they might have been tempted by its telltale leaves.
“We learned quickly that wasn’t the way to do it,†she said. “It’s very harsh.â€
Hemp fiber could strengthen more than rope. Manufacturers could use it for fabric, canvas, car upholstery, shoes, paper and other products. But they had to import it from other countries because U.S. farmers were forbidden from growing it.
So more than 20 years ago, Rosemary and Alice Reed tried to lobby lawmakers in Washington, pushing for the legalization of hemp production. They couldn’t get an audience with any members of Nebraska’s congressional delegation, though they did get time with Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.
“It had been a little bee in my bonnet for a while: Let’s make this farm a little more diverse, and we think hemp is quite diverse,†Rosemary Reed said. “We just didn’t have the means to do it.â€
A few things had to happen first. Lawmakers had to realize you can’t get high on low-THC hemp. And in 2018, the U.S. Farm Bill legalized the plant, striking it from the Drug Enforcement Agency’s list of controlled substances and opening the door for a 2019 Nebraska law allowing regulated production.
And the next year, a pandemic had to rearrange the world — and its work habits — for Rosemary Reed to wonder why? Why was she still running her production company from Washington?
She could run it from anywhere.
“I thought, ‘Why am I leasing a very expensive space when my staff has scattered to the winds?’ I said goodbye to my lease and moved to Lincoln to help get things going.â€
* * *
Dakota Dzerk didn’t know what to expect from the two half-acre test plots.
Alice Reed’s son had worked for a flower distributor, ran a landscaping crew and had graduated with honors with a horticulture degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
But he’d never grown hemp. He talked to others in the industry and chose two types of fiber-forward seeds, one for each plot. He plowed, tilled, tested the soil, added compost and, in May, planted 50 pounds of seed at each site.
And then he waited.
“I was like, ‘I hope this works.’ I was kind of watching the field daily, just making sure something was going to pop up.â€
Watching the field was about all he had to do as the summer unfolded. He didn’t need to water the hemp, or fertilize it, or weed it; the stalks grew so dense they allowed no room for neighbors.
“We didn't do anything after I planted it until we had to cut it down.â€
By July, he could see ribbing on the stalks — a sign the fiber was building — and the pollen sacs were opening. They were ready for their first hemp harvest.
But first, they had to test its THC levels, to make sure it was impotent. State law prohibits the plant from having more than 0.3%, and there’s no margin for error.
In 2020, 27 of 150 samples failed the test, and the state destroyed more than 24 acres. This year’s failure figures won’t be released until after Jan. 1.
Reeds Green Grower’s first hemp attempt passed the test, and they hired a farmer from Malcolm to help with the harvest. Rosemary Reed also hired a film crew.
In early August, with cameras recording from the ground and a drone hovering above, Jared Eucker climbed onto his 1964 Massey Ferguson Super 90.
He lowered his sickle bar and dropped the crop in less than 15 minutes.
“Doesn’t feel like much to me,†he said after.
“But it’s a lot to us,†Rosemary Reed said.
They wouldn’t know how much — or how little — for at least two more months.
* * *
They never intended to make money with their first hemp harvest.
On a self-serving level, it was a test, an experiment — to see if they could do it, to learn how to do it better, to try to reinvent their farm.
The neighbor who works their land gets 60% of the crop’s proceeds, and the Reed family’s remaining 40% barely covers its property taxes, Alice Reed said.
At the time, she’d just finished paying their anhydrous bill — more than $6,000.
“That’s a lot of money to be putting on something you don’t make anything back on,†she said. “We’re trying to come up with something we can plant that will make us some money and that isn’t harmful to the soil.â€
They know they can’t replace the state’s traditional crops. But what if they devoted 100 acres — a third of their land — to hemp?
What if others did the same thing?
“And that would be the hope,†Rosemary Reed said. “That that’s what local farmers do. They’re not going to replace corn and soybeans. We know that.â€
That would help their broader goal — to show other farmers hemp is viable, and to have enough harvested hemp to justify opening a processing plant.
That would solve the Catch-22: Farmers are reluctant to supply hemp until there’s a processing plant to sell it to. But until there’s enough supply, a processing plant is cost-prohibitive.
The pros: Their farm is on a rail line, close to highways and zoned agricultural-commercial, Rosemary Reed said. The con: They don’t have the $3 million to $5 million needed for a building and equipment, and they don’t have other farmers ready to commit their crops.
“It’s a chicken-and egg-thing. Do you build a processing plant first and just hope they will come with product?â€
It worked for a fourth-generation farm near Great Bend, Kansas.
It started adding hemp to its crop rotation in 2019 — a good learning year but not a great production year, said co-owner Melissa Nelson. And then it had a good crop in 2020, but the buyer bailed.
“We were like, we've got farmers that say they would grow if they had a place to take it. And we've got manufacturers reaching out to us, asking where we're taking our hemp to get processed because they want it.â€
South Bend Industrial Hemp bridged the gap this year, opening a processing plant with 1,600 acres under contract — including 1 acre from Reed’s Green Growers.
* * *
They left the plants on the ground for two weeks, a process called retting — letting time and moisture and micro-organisms help separate the fiber from the stalk.
A nearby farmer scooped it all up, leaving them with four large round bales and a smaller fifth — the future of their farm, all bundled up.
But they would have to wait nearly two more months to see what kind of grade their test crop would earn.
Finally, in mid-October, after hiring someone to load the bales on a flatbed and haul them more than 250 miles to the processing plant in Kansas, the family learned the results:
Just less than $500 for an acre of hemp. Less than the farm grosses on an acre of corn.
“This year's harvest was an experiment,†Rosemary Reed said. “And we did not expect to make any money. And we didn’t. I mean, sadly we didn’t.â€
In fact, they spent about $500 on the seed itself. But Dzerk, the farm manager, realizes now he overseeded, and could have probably put half as much down for the same result. And if the farm scales up and plants more acres, he could cut its cost-per-pound seed prices by buying in bulk.
And to make this first crop possible, they paid others for the cutting, baling and shipping. But if they could grow enough to justify buying their own equipment — and if they had their own processing plant nearby — those contracted costs would disappear, Rosemary Reed said.
So they’re moving forward. They plan to try again next year, and plant at least another acre, maybe more. They need to negotiate with their sharecropper, she said.
“He's going to have to be convinced that we can make some profit if we take 20 acres out of the corn and soybeans and put it into hemp.â€
Just like they have to convince other farmers to replace some of their bread-and-butter crops with hemp, to help make their family’s plan — and their plant — possible. But they’re prepared.
“It’s a selling job,†Rosemary Reed said. “That’s what we’re doing right now. We’re selling a concept.â€