2019 ASHS Annual Conference

Although hemp (Cannabis sativa) was widely grown in the US during the 1940’s to support the war effort, this was an exception to its illegal status as a crop established in the 1930’s. The 2014 and 2018 farm bills have progressively legalized hemp cultivation, sparking tremendous interest in hemp farming and processing. While there is an established, but small, market for hemp food and fiber based products in the US that is largely supplied by hemp from China and Canada, the market for cannabidiol (CBD) is exploding. Peer-reviewed agronomic data on hemp are scarce, since there has been minimal public funding for academic research, but with legalization of hemp, that is expected to change. Cornell University has assembled a multidisciplinary team of researchers and extension educators who are building a program to study hemp cultivation, pests and diseases, microbiome, agroecology, biochemistry, tissue culture and transformation, production economics, and to establish a long-term breeding program to produce new cultivars. This talk will provide an update on key advances and barriers we have encountered in the process of normalizing academic research on hemp.

Dr. Larry Smart is a Professor in the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University and is Associate Director of Cornell AgriTech in Geneva, NY. Larry is a plant geneticist and breeder whose lab uses genomic tools in breeding shrub willow bioenergy crops and to better understand hybrid vigor and pest and disease resistance. More recently, he has been leading Cornell’s hemp research and extension team and has initiated a long-term breeding program to develop new hemp cultivars for New York State. He received his B.S. in Biology at Cornell University, Ph.D. in Genetics at Michigan State University, and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at UC-Davis