Jacob Bish, a farm equipment dealer is suing the state of Nebraska for not granting him one of the ten hemp cultivation licenses that were issued to farmers who wish to participate in a test program during the 2019 farming season.
176 applicants had expressed interest in obtaining a license to participate in a hemp research program instituted after the legislature passed LB657 this spring. The research program was designed by the State Patrol and the Department of Agriculture.
When the winners were announced in July and Bish Enterprises wasn’t among the winners, Jacob Bish penned a letter to the Director of the Department of Agriculture in Nebraska notifying him that Bish Enterprises was being placed in a position where it had to choose between incurring a high cost to test its products out of state or to defy the law and test his products himself in Nebraska.
In his letter, he affirmed that the state was going to lose a lot of money to the nearby states because the department didn’t license Bish Enterprises, a company which has the capacity to test hemp consistently.
Bish therefore asked the Department of Agriculture to grant him a challenge hearing and on July 18 he was notified that the department had declined his request. On August 2 he escalated his request and asked for a formal hearing after which his application should be selected for licensing. This request was also rejected, and Bish decided to go to court.
In his suit, Jacob Bish states that the department failed to randomly select applicants for the limited licenses available. He added that the selection process was arbitrary, unreasonable and capricious.
The state had arranged the names of the applicants in alphabetical order and then assigned each name a number. The numbers were then run through an online number generator which randomly selected the ten names of the people who would be granted cultivation licenses.
In the application that he had submitted to the state, Bish indicated that he would get different varieties of hemp seeds and grow them under the same conditions. Thereafter, he would measure the yield that each variety gave him so that he identifies the varieties that are best suited to the Nebraska environment.
He also added that he was already growing two test plots of wild hemp, which is an heirloom variety that isn’t regulated under the law regulating the hemp industry in the state.
It would be enlightening to know what hemp industry players, such as Therma Bright Inc. (TSX.V: THRM) (OTC: THRBF) and TransCanna Holdings Inc. (CSE: TCAN) (FRA: TH8), think about the lottery method that was used to select the people to take part in the hemp cultivation research program.
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