04/01/2026
The biggest April Fools’ joke in agriculture was telling American farmers h**p was finally legal in 2018.
We believed it. Some of us treated h**p like a real crop, invested in it, got other farmers to plant it, did research, developed products, and tried to build real supply chains around grain, fiber, hurd, and innovation. What happened? Banking problems. Payment processing problems. Raids. Stigma. Families harmed. Imported material undercutting domestic growers because other countries actually supported their h**p industries while ours was left to twist in the wind.
I developed a patent-pending antimicrobial product from h**p research and still run into barriers because it’s h**p. I’m involved in h**pcrete and can’t even count on growing hurd at break-even while imported material comes in cheaper from countries that didn’t treat h**p like a punchline.
So no, the problem is not h**p’s “track record.” The problem is that America never built a stable h**p economy. It legalized risk for farmers without legalizing confidence, infrastructure, banking, processing, or markets. Eight years later, we still don’t even have a new farm bill—just another extension through September 30, 2026. That’s not support. That’s uncertainty.
We were told h**p was the future. What we got was “April Fools.”
