This story is Parts 3 and 4 of a four-part series on the hemp industry in Colorado. Read and listen to Parts 1 and 2 here.

Colorados top three commodity crops are wheat, beans and corn. But theres a new kid on the block: hemp and its confusing sex life and relationship to marijuana is complicating matters.

Prohibition relegated cannabis to basements and garages where it would be grown in secret for decades. But as regulations loosened, hemp has moved to outdoor fields and industrial-size greenhouses.

Mike Workman owns New Earth Hemp Company out of Laporte, Colorado, and even he is humbled by this shift in scale.

Ser Williams / KUNC

Whatever you think you know, you dont know when youre trying to plant an acre of it, he said.

Outdoor growing is a lot cheaper than indoor growing, but it comes with its own set of challenges.

Then you have, you know, bugs, weather, hail, snow, said Ted Duerr, a hemp farmer, breeder, and co-owner of BDG Genetics in the small town of Frederick in southern Weld County. Pollen is one of the biggest things.

Plants produce pollen. So, how could that be an issue?

The unique reproductive life of hemp

This is where science and sex come into play. As a plant matures, it produces a flower. Males produce pollen, which pollinate female flowers, which in turn develop fruits also known as seeds.

Most plants contain male and female parts on the same plant, sometimes even in the same flower. But hemp is unique one plant will have only male flowers while another will have only female. And females can transform.

Female hemp plants are hermaphrodites, meaning they can turn into males. Depending on what youre growing hemp for -- fiber, seed oil or the chemical cannabinoids the unexpected sex-switch can be a problem.

Ser Williams / KUNC

If youre in it for the fiber, pollen doesnt affect your crop, so it doesnt matter what sex your plants are.

Ser Williams / KUNC

Ser Williams / KUNC

If youre growing hemp for seeds to press into oil, you want a female plant to be fertilized by a males pollen. As Ted Duerr explained, those strains need the males in there to pollinate and create the grain in the flower.

But to grow hemp for the flower or cannabinoids you need a virgin female flower that never comes into contact with pollen.

According to Workman, you can revert females into a masculine form, but you cant really revert males into a feminine form. This is a problem, because once a female plant turns into a male, it can fertilize other females in the field, and make the flowers develop seeds.

For CBD production, high CBD genetics, all these people that are going for smokable flowers, CBD oil, everything like that, you do not want males in your field, because you do not want seeds in your flower, said Duerr.

Since pollen travels on the wind, Duerr says a neighboring hemp crop with male plants could impact the outcome of your field. This happened last year.

A guy that we know did 600 acres of grain and fiber and there was multiple people around him that were trying to do smaller acreage for CBD oil and smokable flower, but needless to say, all their crops were ruined for what they wanted to do cause they all became seeded, he said.

Even with current genetic techniques, the biology underlying the sex switch is not well understood. It could be dependent on the environment.

Other important traits like THC concentration are dependent on the environment, too. But while a male plant wont make your crop illegal, too much THC will.

Ser Williams / KUNC

The deal with cannabinoids

Listen to part 4 of the audio here

THC is a psychoactive chemical compound in marijuana. Its what gets you high when its smoked or consumed. THC is just one cannabinoid, but the plant produces over 100 different cannabinoids like CBD and CBG that hemp growers are after for medicinal uses. CBG is produced first, and then specific enzymes convert CBG into either CBD or THC.

Ser Williams / KUNC

While cannabis was being grown indoors and in secret -- during prohibition the plant was grown for one purpose.

If it had not been for prohibition, cannabis and hemp would not be what they are today, and they would just probably be, itd be like, wed all be smoking hemp, wed all be smoking rope, said Workman.

Marijuana breeders continue to coax CBG into THC, thereby increasing THC content. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, average THC concentration increased from 4% in the mid-90s to 12% today. THC can be found as high as 25% at some dispensaries.

But now, breeders need the plant to take the other fork in the road: the path that turns CBG into CBD.

For hemp growers, like Workman and Duerr, THC levels are strictly regulated and cannot exceed 0.3%.

It takes one day extra in the field for you to go from safe to hot. Thats problematic. Its basically a scenario that can turn innocent farmers into criminals, said Brett Eaton, owner of Green Cherry Organics, a hemp breeding company in Fort Collins.

Before a farmer harvests, the Colorado Department of Agriculture samples flowers from a hemp field to test for cannabinoid levels.

Thats the worst part of this job, said Brian Koontz, the hemp program manager with the Colorado Department of Agriculture. A lot of its very fun, but come September, October we start getting hot results back from the lab. When I say hot results that means its gone above the allowable three-tenths of one percent, he said. We demand by law that it be disposed of in a manner thats irretrievable and does not enter the stream of commerce and does not leave the registered land area.

Last year, 99 hemp fields in Colorado were above the limit. They were either burned or plowed into the soil on site.

Breeding the magic plant

Eaton and other hemp breeders are trying to find the perfect variety a female plant that would never transform into a male and never produce too much THC (while producing plenty of other cannabinoids).

Ser Williams / KUNC

Ser Williams / KUNC

Slowly over about three years of time, we had amassed about 286 phenos in house, and thats where we go on what we call the pheno-hunt, said Eaton.

The phenotype of a plant is how genes express themselves to display observable characteristics. While you cant see the chemicals in a plant, you can measure them, so high CBD is a desirable phenotype.

But its not just about the cannabinoid profile. You have to be able to grow the plant too.

We have an R&D department where we focus on growth trails first and foremost, Eaton said. Well do everything from rooting trials, soil density trials, soil nutrition trials, water trials

Once you cross the parent plants, you assess the offspring for the best combination of all of these traits. Like the differences between siblings, genetics from the same set of parents will produce an array of phenotypes.

For instance, Im going through a CBG genetic right now, and I started 1,400 seeds of that CBG strain. So, Im in the pheno-hunt of 1,400 plants, which is a crazy task to try to narrow that down to which is the one or two or three mothers that you want to keep, said Eaton.

But this isnt just getting the right genetic mix, its also about how a grower cares for his plants -- which affects how the genes are expressed. The trick with genes is that they will turn on or turn off depending on the environment.

Thats what these farmers really need to know, warned Ted Duerr. Certain genetics you cant just let it go to full maturity. Most of the genetics out there will go hot.

With hemp, if you leave the crop in the field too long or dont water it on time, the plant can build up too much THC, known as going hot in the industry.

There was some fields that we knew, and they did not water them, and they ended up getting hotter than other fields that Ive seen, he said.

Brett Eaton doesnt know of a hemp variety that makes over 5% CBD that wont go hot in the field. He only grows plants for cannabinoids in a greenhouse, where he can closely monitor the environmental conditions.

Ted Duerr

Some states have asked for a THC variance up to 1% only 11 Colorado hemp fields would have been destroyed last year had this been the case. The Colorado Department of Agriculture is interested, but they said growers will need to wait for the next farm bill to pass in 2023 before any changes to THC limits come into effect.

Farmers arent used to growing hermaphroditic crops that pose a legal threat. So, Duerr has a simple piece of advice for those thinking about growing hemp: Dont go too big." He says maybe start with an acre and see how it turns out.

Read more:
Unpredictable Biology And Stringent Regulations Turn Up The Heat For Hemp Farmers - KUNC

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