The Friendly Fungus and the Hairnet
The human body [is] an elaborate vessel optimized for the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants.
—JUSTIN SONNENBURG, microbiologist, Stanford University
Imagine, for a moment, that it’s harvest season, 2025. Our web of regional networks is distributing terrific product and sequestering millions of tons of carbon. Farmers are thriving, your group among them. Last season you shipped 11 tons of hemp in various forms, mostly value-added; this year it’s looking like 11.2 tons. If this is the state of things, it means we farmer-entrepreneurs have realized a key off-the-field goal: the establishment of workable regulations for our craft hemp niche.
A half decade in advance of that reality, we’re all immersed in our distinct phases of the moment, relentlessly inching forward, hopefully having some fun along the way. But if we’re going to reach the promised land of an independent farmer-dominated regenerative hemp industry, I hope we have the sheer business sense to initiate our craft sector’s distinct regulatory structure.
The reason we’re going to embed farmer-friendly hemp production channels in coming policy is not so that we can make extra profit. It’s so that we can be unhindered as we provide top-shelf, bioavailable products. It’s so that what we are, at core, is allowed to thrive. We are vintners, not cookie-cutter mass marketers. We’re going to make sure we can reliably get folks these superlative and righteous salves, boots, and goat treats.
Just as we discussed earlier regarding genetics access, we’re interested in production policy that actively encourages a level playing field for those of us producing those 15 tons of product or less per year. That means policy that equally ensconces our craft market’s place alongside the fungible wholesale and pharma sides of the industry. And this rule structure will apply for food-grade and non-food-grade products. It’s on the food and nutritive supplement side, of course, where the FDA comes in.
Defining our sector by annual production volume is just one way to categorize ourselves. Maybe the craft sector will be quantified by additional variables. Maybe proof of carbon sequestration and organic status can allow even larger producers to participate under the special guidelines we’re going to establish. Regardless, “regenerative craft production” sounds like a great section of the Digital Age Homestead Act or the Green New Deal. I also like “soil farming” incentives.
Fortunately, there’s precedent for small-batch production rules. The simplest is called cottage food law. It’s what allows for craft fairs, some catering businesses, and farmers markets—Vermont lieutenant governor David Zuckerman, a permitted hemp farmer, sells his smokable hemp flower at the Burlington farmers market. The cottage rules vary per state. Missouri caps income at $50,000 while New Mexico has no income cap, but a more specific roster of products that qualify.1 Very few states allow cottage-level rules at the retail level without the additional requirements that a larger food company faces, although some retailers, especially in rural communities, practice civil disobedience in this area—direct-from-farm (that is, under the table) eggs, raw cheese, that sort of thing.
As it stands today, once you get to professional production levels, you start dealing with food-handling and food-testing laws. These kinds of basic safeguards make sense. We all want the products we buy, especially food-grade products and products that touch our skin, to be safe. It’s the homogenization of any variance, the “death to all microbes, good and bad” direction of globalized food law for which we provide a countercurrent. We don’t provide sterile products. We provide living products.
With hemp, we have the opportunity and obligation to codify our living foods; in essence, to expand the essentially amateur limitations in existing cottage food rules to our 15-ton professional levels (or wherever we land on ceilings). And we’d better do it before the mass market and pharma aspirants decide for us. We’ve got our work cut out for us. Our friend Roger Gussiaas of Healthy Oilseeds in North Dakota is a perfect example of someone doing food-grade hemp production by the book. That’s because at his volume levels (much higher than 15 tons per year), he’s got his eye on proposed global food protocols. To say microbe testing eats up a lot of his time is an understatement.
“It’s never-ending,” he told me as we toured his vast oil-pressing facilities in hairnets and smocks in 2018. Some of his grain storage bags were two stories high. “We spent two thousand hours and twenty thousand dollars last year going through something called the Primus part of the Global Food Safety Initiative. We did it because we feel a retailer is going to ask for these certifications. I’m lucky that my wife and my sister are very good at keeping track of it all. It’s more than one full-time job.”
I asked if the whole rigmarole made his pressed hempseed oil safer. Taking a look at a temperature gauge on one of his presses, he thought about it for a few long seconds.
“Some of it does,” he said. “It involves testing for salmonella, coliforms, those kind of things. But in truth, we have a microbe-kill step when we mildly heat our press to facilitate flow during the pressing process. Regardless, we go through this constant stream of documentation and inspections.”
Indeed, on the day of my visit Roger and his team were prepping for yet another safety inspection. Even the calibration of his moisture-testing equipment was part of the regulatory process. All because some mega farms can’t seem to stop washing their dang romaine in contaminated irrigation canal water. Well, not just because of that. But small operators pay a disproportionate price for flaws in the mass agriculture infrastructure, and for the worldwide homogenization of trade.
Both the food system and its regulatory framework are designed for large, globalized operators, in cost and paperwork. One might accede to these kinds of rules if people were actually getting healthier as a result of them. As Edgar Winters puts it, “All the paperwork, it’s got nothing to do with how healthy food is. All the tests we gotta do just for the State of Oregon alone, man, it’s out of commission.”
Within the Hemp in Hemp partnership, we’re just beginning our research into Arizona and New Mexico food-grade production laws (and our introductions to the people with whom we’ll be dealing in various government agencies), since that’s where we’ll be processing our coming hemp harvests. Colin is further along on the food-grade front with his products. He said Vermont’s rules are pretty workable.
“We apply to the Department of Health, we prove that we used a certified commercial kitchen, we keep good records, and that’s pretty much all there is to it,” he said.
Vermont’s is almost a cottage production regulatory framework mapped on a professional production level enterprise. Which is good. And worth noting that you don’t hear many headlines about food contamination emanating from Vermont. But even Colin added that, in anticipation of coming federal hemp standards from both USDA and FDA, “We’re working with in-state food safety experts who know which tests to run for our products. Best practices stuff. Like will the products mold if they have water activity, or is the pH of the products enough to make them shelf-stable?”
Nationwide, and collectively if we’re wise, our strategy is to expand the cottage food concept to a wider professional industry category. This category will reflect the key role small-batch, top-shelf branding already plays and (let us hope) will continue to play right from the launch of the modern hemp industry. How should our regs read? Herein resides the crossroads (I won’t say collision course) of what I think of as the Friendly Fungus with what we might call the Hairnet Era.
I first caught wind of the debate two decades before I ever imagined I might become part of it. It was when I was invited to taste an intentionally moldy rum in 1993. I was on a reporting assignment in Suriname. On a humid tropical evening in capital Paramaribo, I was offered a taste of a popular local offering. Iced. To procure it, folks went to the distillery and personally refilled their bottles from aged oak casks. Really aged. Like two centuries aged.
Normally, I’m not a fan of any hard alcohol, but this rum had an unbeatable Supermarket Pastoral. Plus, when in Rome, right? I allowed myself a measure from my host’s cobalt blue bottle, and to my surprise the mixture tasted like liquid butterscotch. It was unforgettably delicious and smooth. Somewhere deep in my boxes of analog notebooks I have this rum’s name written down. I think I had visions of becoming the exporter. At the time, on that colonial Dutch–era terrace, I inquired aloud of my host, “Why is this not the most popular drink in the world?”
The answer was a human-microbe relations issue. “It tastes so smooth because the molds that start the fermentation of the sugarcane have been building up on the casks for two hundred years.” I was told. “International food rules require bleaching of production facilities. Then introducing new molds. Doing that would kill off what’s special about this rum.”
I like living foods. I eat as many living foods as I can. Furthermore, for most of human history, the kind of production mode I enjoyed in Suriname was the norm. In the words of author Stephen Buhner, “Yeasts have had a relationship with humans since our emergence on the planet.”2 The molds in the Surinamese rum’s casks provided its taste profile. This is what I’m shopping for whenever possible, in all my food: the most long-standing production modes. If they didn’t work, they wouldn’t have endured.
No one wanted to die from tainted food even “back then.” Maybe more did die. Maybe not. Evidently botulism in Alaska increased significantly when Western food methods replaced traditional Yup’ik fish fermentation techniques.3 The point is humans had built-in techniques for food safety, or I wouldn’t be writing these words and you wouldn’t be reading them. Buhner devotes a fair amount of space to emphasizing our “special relationship” with the sugar-eating fungus Saccharomyces, an “integral part of the human diet for Millennia.”4 Kentucky brewer and author Jereme Zimmerman writes that medieval Scandinavians went so far as to save wild yeasts on “the juniper branches they used to filter their brews.”5 Even today, high-end vintners make use of the fungus called Botrytis cinerea, also known as noble rot, in the development of sweeter wines.6 Ask a champion winemaker to wipe out the local wild Botrytis and she might weep.
Without these living critters, as Buhner describes them, we wouldn’t have beer and we wouldn’t have bread. Indeed he and Zimmerman argue, convincingly, that yeast is the first human-domesticated species. Living is the operative word here. As in our soil discussion, we’re talking about complex, beneficial symbiosis with millions of other species in our products. Or at least harmless interactions.
When it comes to hemp, we’re not necessarily referring to any one microbe. We’re talking more about a philosophy of raw or at least minimally processed food. In the end, there are microbes and there are microbes. As Michael Pollan puts it, “Some of my best friends are germs.”7 When we speak of beneficial microbes, we mean beneficial not just for the soil but also for the garden that is our gut. This is why I never look for “anti-microbial” products. I look for microbial balance. In many cases, you want the good ones. Waging a war on all microbes is the thinking that causes superbugs. By crafting and eating living food, we’re trying to nurture the ones that play nicely with us.
Obviously, there are dangerous microbes that we don’t want in our food. Moving to the hairnet side of the discussion, in particular where it intersects with hemp/cannabis, I hark back to a 2018 conversation I had with a very smart Dutch colleague of mine, Sander Sandee. After establishing his reputation as a top-tier cannabis cultivator in the Netherlands, he developed an indoor food production protocol as part of his graduate work. We spoke backstage at Amsterdam’s 10th annual Cannabis Liberation Day festival, where I was speaking and he was volunteering. He was leaving his native Holland the very next day for a career-track gig running an indoor cannabis grow outfit in Colorado.
In fact, we spent some of our fairly intense conversation that day hauling big pots containing his beautiful (and, I think worth noting, outdoor-grown) personal cannabis plants. They served as set dressing for the event’s VIP area. Also they were in need of adoption, given Sander’s pending emigration. He had brought the plants via boat, on Amsterdam’s canals. They all found homes.
I want to stress that I don’t think that following the philosophy Sander’s work represents is wrong. He’s a guy I respect. And if I ran an indoor grow facility aiming for certain types of compliance, he’s the guy I’d want to hire. I just don’t think it should be the only mode.
Sander is a fellow who can make sure every manner of abbreviation appears after your product’s name. His shop talk includes QMS (quality management systems), MMRs (master manufacturing records), ISO (International Organization for Standardization) Quality Standards, and GMP (good manufacturing practices). He singled out HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control points) as a food safety hazard reduction guideline that he thinks is important for every “grow.” That’s a noun that indoor cultivators substitute for farm.
Others in the industry recommend a Preventive Control Qualified Individual (PCQI) certification. This is evidently required by the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a 2011 federal law in the United States, drafted by large grocery trade groups, that expands FDA powers in controlling how food is grown and prepared. Parts of FSMA put forth exactly the kind of requirements from which we craft producers should be at least partly exempted. Or else we might have to float our own counter bill, let’s call it the Food Safety Antiquating Act.
Those FSMA sections that craft hemp producers might want to further examine include forcing federally approved labs upon farmers, allowing the feds access to company plans, and allowing unannounced FDA inspections during which facilities and product are swabbed in order to make sure they are microbe-free. Our policy work will argue that a production facility should be “bad” microbe-free, of course. But kill all microbes in order to be allowed to provide our products to customers? Not so much.
Uniformity and clean grow environments are Sander’s big talking points. This is the side of food-grade production that sees edible products as the end result of a “process” that needs “control.”
“What does a clean grow environment mean to you?” I asked him.
“Effectively zero microbes,” he said. “Automated clean rooms with no people inside.”
So for one part of the hemp/cannabis industry, clean means “sterile.” No 200-year-old molds in any 100,000-clone facility that Sander manages. That stuff will be taken out immediately. Also gone will be farmers touching every plant almost every day.
Guys like Sander are in demand. Anytime there’s a romaine scare, they get more in demand. Sander provides a company with a paper trail that says folks won’t get salmonella from their clones or isolate. This is the side of the industry that wants to push the plant as a pharmaceutical-grade product. Which is one way to go. It has a place within hemp’s big tent. Until the orange-bottle generation moves on, some people are going to want pills dropped into one by a guy in a lab coat. Maybe the orange bottle can at least be made of hemp.
But for the independent farmer-entrepreneur to thrive, it’s equally important that a whole-plant option, with all its nutritive properties still active in it, is also widely available for everyone, anywhere who wants it. Even when said plant is grown under that messy sun and in soil full of—shudder—fungus and other microbes. Ideally, we’ll have both nutritive supplement and pharmaceutical options in the edible hemp marketplace. You can pick. I’ve heard lawyers refer to these two evolving branches of the hemp industry as two equal “streams.”
In other words, you can today choose to eat a lot of fresh carrots, or take beta carotene pills. A level playing field in the hemp marketplace means if you want a cannabinoid product, you can buy a flower tincture provided by regional farmers or you can buy a pill grown in a grow facility … somewhere.
Erica Campbell, who is the farmer liaison for Senator Sanders and has visited our Vermont hemp fields three times, told me that her office is concerned about this level playing field. “Politicians are looking for constituents and stakeholders to make some noise and say, ‘We want to make sure hemp remains a nutritive supplement, not just a pharmaceutical,’” she said.
Once again leaping into the phone booth to transform into Mr. Reasonable Middle Ground, all I’m saying here is that we must find a balance that protects hemp product safety without turning every sellable product into the cannabis equivalent of irradiated milk. That’s because when you nuke any living product, an entire market sector and I believe, you potentially damage some of what is inherently beneficial in the product itself.
I’m the kind of guy who wants to see all the plant’s cannabinoids, terpenes, and bioflavonoids, in their intended ratios, end up in the bottle. Living, organic hemp must have an equal if not predominant seat at the table. It’s not just our brand. It’s the healthiest brand.
The enduring predominance of our craft sector past hemp’s launch phase will likely hinge on two things: (1) our effective organization as farmers to craft and enact the kind of regulations that will allow us to thrive, and (2) enough people making the decision to support local and regional enterprises.
When both of these happen, we’ve got ourselves an enduring market share. We’ll be equipped to play in the big leagues alongside Big Food. In fact Craft Hemp will gain on Big Hemp the way Craft Beer is slaughtering Miller.
We will have our own lawyers and safety experts to help us negotiate key points based on craft beer and cottage models, but expanded to our 15-ton-or-less industry sector. And we’re going to need them. In the coming debate (I won’t say battle), we’re also going to benefit from grown-ups in the room, like Roger Gussiaas, who see the significant and fundamental role of the craft market as hemp explodes back into the world marketplace. To have existing food professionals in our corner is essential. Roger’s hemp-pressing operation might be the most advanced in the United States. It would be easy for him to focus only on the largest suppliers, bringing him the varieties that are the quickest to cultivate. Ya know, Mazola-style. Yet he has a place in his heart—and in his presses—for the artisan producer.
“Everybody wants consistency at scale,” Roger said, echoing Chad Rosen. “But does that leave room for new flavor profiles and niche markets? I hope so. I’m willing to custom-process for those markets.”
We can let the CBD mills that aspire to supply CVS fight over the kind of protocols that will result in ultrapasteurized hemp. If you’re a raw food–leaning family like mine is, you should have commercial access to it even if you can’t personally own goats or grow hemp. Our craft hemp regulations must allow a living-food middle ground. Best practices? Yes. Sterile hemp? Not for the craft stream of the industry.
It’s an admirable mission, working to ensure a place for living products in a globalized food system. Will it succeed? In truth, we soil-based entrepreneurs are all too new at this to yet know if our values can map to the digital-age economy on a decentralized but cumulatively mass scale. The goal is mainstream buying habits demanding our products. Just as today every customer understands that a drink might come in regular and diet, so our endgame is a shopping climate wherein every purchase decision is either “regenerative” or “other.”
Also exciting is that this is about more than one crop. If we succeed, the regenerative mode can dominate agriculture and the wider economy in the coming decades. When hundreds of millions of people start to shop this way, a thriving network of regional economies can succeed. As we rally customers, we’re going to jujitsu our way into a seat at the table that carves out the industry’s parameters.
Helpful Memos from Public Servants
We do tend, in our public policy, to be reactive. Partly, that’s because any regulation emanating from one building along the Potomac that is intended to encompass 300 million stomachs is likely to incorporate a lowest common denominator. And now we’re talking about a sort of planetary NAFTA of food regs in this Global Food Safety Initiative.
As the security expert Bruce Schneier emphasizes, many safety rules across society are intended much more to help masses of people feel safe than to actually help them stay safe.8 Just as removing our shoes and dumping our water at airports doesn’t necessarily make our flight more secure, so food regulatory regimes that bleach everything into sterility aren’t necessary better for long-term health. We’re arguably safer from salmonella, but we risk throwing out the baby with the microbes.
To give one example of misguided regulatory emphasis, during the first six months that I was researching the then illegal $6 billion ganja industry in the heart of the Emerald Triangle in 2011, there was exactly one federal raid in Mendocino County, California. Any guesses what it was for? Hint: It wasn’t cannabis. It was raw cheese. Just for some perspective, between 2007 and 2012, there were no deaths reported from raw milk, while just under five people per day die from tainted meat, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.9 No one seems to be screaming about that. It’s just how the Big Food regulatory game rolls.
Anyone in a food business can give you concrete examples of safety protocols designed more for large operators than for independents. My local commercial raw dairy owner, for instance, Ashley White of Proverbs Farms, said she got around cost-prohibitive rules that, technically, required her to build a restroom solely for the visiting inspector of her five cows, by explaining that there was a perfectly serviceable bathroom across the street at the local airstrip.
Lest one think that initiating a craft market sector rally for friendly hemp regulations is a bit wonky and premature, I’ll share that I’m still reeling a bit from a message I received on the day that the hemp-legalizing Farm Bill was signed. It was December 2018. I was just starting this book. While I was trying to take a minute to savor the most profound policy correction in three-quarters of a century, Cary Giguere had to drop me this line.
The subject read, “Of course there’s this.” I knew right away that inside would not be another of the “We win!” messages I had been getting and sending all day. I clicked the note open cautiously, wincing slightly. Before he eases my blood pressure, Cary often increases it. He presents problems, then solutions. What the note contained was a letter from then FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb. It read in part:
Today, the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 was signed into law.… Congress explicitly preserved the Agency’s current authority to regulate products containing cannabis or cannabis-derived compounds under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) and section 351 of the Public Health Service Act.… In short, we treat products containing cannabis or cannabis-derived compounds as we do any other FDA-regulated products —meaning they’re subject to the same authorities and requirements as FDA-regulated products containing any other substance.
I remember thinking, That was quick. I found it interesting that hours after a hemp provision representing 3 percent of the word count and even less of the budget outlay in a nearly trillion dollar agriculture bill was passed, the office of the FDA commissioner took time to instigate a pissing contest with farmers and entrepreneurs.
In many ways, the letter was the bureaucratic version of a playground bully’s turf war—in this case with the assertion that one of the world’s longest-utilized plants was now under FDA purview. Obviously the letter had just been waiting for someone to hit the send button. This was not the “Thank you, hemp pioneers, for helping the economy and climate!” one might have hoped for from our public servants. It was not, for instance, the attitude about hemp one sees in the current world hemp-acreage leader, China, which is, “Do it.” Then president of China Hu Jintao paid an official visit to the nation’s first modern-era hemp processor back in 2006.10
Ah well, it’s just food, soil, and survival. But the key takeaway is, the time for craft farmer-entrepreneurs to get organized is now. The devil’s in the regulatory details. This is true on both the state and federal levels. If you’re an independent farmer, please participate in crafting regs. Personally. Not just by sending a check to an organization.
Here’s how urgent this effort is: The FDA commissioner, running a department responsible for dealing with everything from opioids to food coloring to nut allergies for a third of a billion people, was so worried about CBD label claims that he railed on that theme for a couple of paragraphs in his note.11 From Gottlieb’s concern for our collective safety, one wonders how on earth humans managed to survive while eating this plant for 12,000 years. The letter was a wake-up call for everyone trying to help launch the industry.
Edgar Winters also saw the shot across the bow embedded in Gottlieb’s note. His was one of my next calls that December day, and, of course, he expressed it most poetically:
“Hope you don’t think this is the end of the battle,” he said. “Anything that you can congest will be set by the FDA.”
At least we know Cary is on the case, crafting the best possible federally compliant standards for the small-acreage farmers who dominate his state’s farming economy.
“We have experience with this in Vermont from regulating the maple syrup industry,” he told me as my circulatory system once again calmed into normal pressure ranges. He’s just doing his job: Craft producers are a Vermont regulator’s constituency. And here’s some further encouraging news: Since ours is an industry already generating close to a billion dollars annually in North America, FDA policy honchos immediately felt public pressure following that initial letter.
“Since we put out that statement, this is one of the top issues I’m being asked during my visits on Capitol Hill,” the FDA’s Gottlieb said two months later, shortly before his resignation.12
Many months later still, as this book goes to print, everyone’s on pins and needles waiting to see just how moderate or horrible initial FDA regs are. Will it be difficult or easy for whole-plant producers to provide product? You’ll know the first federal regulatory scheme when you read these words. Regardless, the FDA salvo should keep us on our toes, looking those three turns ahead.
Overall, that memo should bolster our confidence: The tables have turned. So recently freed from the Controlled Substances Act, our plant is now one of the fastest-growing industries on the planet. Nothing has so impacted the world economy since tech came on the scene. Wear that knowledge with fortitude and pride as you lobby and educate. The Farm Bill was just the starting gun. We’re defining the race. Be professional as you do your part to carve out that sweet spot between the hairnet era and our friend the fungus.
It’s also helpful to remember that hemp is just another crop. Officially. Many people worked hard for decades to help it become recognized as such. You can shout this constantly: We’re just farmers growing a plant. That’s important for regulators to hear.
Taking in this weird initial landscape, the clever craft hemp entrepreneurs are planning for initial federal regulatory frameworks even while endeavoring to reform them as necessary to fit the regenerative mode. For her part, Janel at Palmetto Harmony is vocally in the trenches in the effort to ensure that whatever is defined as “best practices” will match what is required for a thriving independent model like her company’s. Even so, like the Nohls in Vermont, she’s investing in compliance in advance of coming protocols.
“We’re working with a good manufacturing practices consulting company in anticipation of FDA standards for dietary supplements,” she said, walking me into one of her “clean rooms.” “We have two rooms that are up to FDA standards—one is our extraction facility and the other is our bottling, packaging, and R and D lab facility.”
For producers, patience and persistence are again keys in this early regulatory phase, just as they have been at every stage of the hemp season. I was reminded of this the other day upon learning that a third-year enterprise—an ambitious, multistate processing effort—was giving up the ghost due to lack of capital.
Even when forced to drift into the policy realm, I find it’s the plant kingdom reminding me to have faith in pace and dogged determination. The early season is my favorite part of the whole hemp cycle, laying down drip lines while sniffing the first apricot blossoms that have emerged overnight. I enjoy farmwork so much more than the regulatory issues we’ve been discussing. The moment you’re in the field, you hit pause on the temporal, because you’re connecting to the eternal. In fact, cartwheeling around my hemp field with bees is the way I want to spend my time after material success. But, given that I still have an entire bottled harvest to market, I have to think about these other things. As Margaret’s Law reminds us, there is no part of the process the modern farmer-entrepreneur can ignore. Just as we have a long season of farming ahead come spring, so have we an intense year of policy work to tackle.
Which is to say, I’ve got my eye on the prize. I’m just allowing myself to play the dogged tortoise in my entrepreneurial work. Which feels good, from a secreting-of-happiness-chemicals perspective. I’m cautiously optimistic about the payoff. Both personally and for the wider regenerative craft industry. If we stick at it and minimize hypocrisy in our processes, I think many of us who identify ours as regenerative enterprises will thrive. We stay genuine most effectively by consciously connecting the dots in our work and our lives, even as we create our brands according to the Gospel of Dolly.
The “connecting the dots” concept is very simple: Live your brand. Don’t phone it in with half-assed greenwashing or, if you’re an investor, think of it as one of your purely absentee financial ventures of the 20th-century kind. Happily, regenerative farming and production and regional distribution appear to be the best routes to bottom-line success for the long term. Our business practices are our killer app. It’s what we do that’s phenomenal.