Owyhee Produce, a company based in Oregon, has announced that it will raise the stakes of sustainable packaging by growing and using hemp to make its own packaging materials.
The company intends to grow at least 500 acres of hemp and use the fibers from those plants to make compostable bags for packing onions next spring. Some CBD will also be extracted from the hemp plants from which the fiber for the packaging is obtained.
Owyhee Produce released a list of goals that it is aiming to attain by 2022 in the area of sustainability. They include having 100 percent recyclable and biodegradable packaging, reducing the fuel and water use of each acre on their farms by 25 percent, and being 100 percent carbon neutral.
In a news release, Shay Myers, the general manager of the company, said that it isn’t easy to find a company that is willing to commit itself to attaining the standards that Owyhee Produce has set for itself, but he added that they were willing to do everything possible to reduce waste, carbon emissions and pollution in everything that they do.
Owyhee engages in regenerative farming, a method of farming that, among other things, entails rotating the crops grown on a particular field in order to foster the addition of nutrients to the soil instead of depleting them with each subsequent harvest.
To that end, the company grows onions in one of their fields every five or so years, and the crop expected next year is what they are targeting the hemp packaging materials for.
The company plans to call their hemp bags “Farm FRESH Packaging” and FRESH is an acronym for “Farmed Regenerative Environmentally Sourced Hemp.”
Later this month, the Produce Marketing Association will hold a summit in Anaheim, California on the 18th and 19th. Owyhee Produce intends to showcase these hemp packaging bags at its booth, so this would be a good opportunity for other environmentally-conscious companies to get in touch with Owyhee Produce for a collaboration.
People who grew industrial hemp for CBD this year are already getting jittery that prices are likely to plummet due to a glut on the market. The initiative taken by Owyhee Produce could open more possibilities for markets for hemp, but farmers first need to broaden their vision in order to look beyond CBD.
Experts believe that industry actors like Lexaria Bioscience Corp. (CSE: LXX) (OTCQX: LXRP) and Marijuana Company of America Inc. (OTCQB: MCOA) know all too well that for farmers to benefit long-term from growing hemp, they will need to think about other end markets outside the CBD space.
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