If you’ve driven around rural Central Oregon lately and have taken note of a rise in farms growing stuff that looks like marijuana, you’re not imagining things. Those outdoor fields aren’t marijuana, however (plants containing THC have to be grown in greenhouses around these parts), but hemp—the stuff that goes into all those CBD products out there.
In 2018, Oregon farmers had around 7,000 acres of hemp in cultivation. In 2019—following the passage of the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, which removed hemp from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s list of Schedule 1 drugs—the number of acres spiked to 50,000. To get a sense of what that looks like in Central Oregon, we asked Sisters resident Greg Moring, currently producing the hemp documentary, “Hemp is Back,” to share some of the images he’s compiled for his film. This is just a small sampling of what’s out there. See a preview of the film at vimeo.com/38424066
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2020.
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