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Plant geneticist Larry Smart, head of Cornell University’s hemp research in Geneva, N.Y., was a guest speaker on the Lancaster County Hemp Circuit August 20-21 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Lancaster Farming newspaper caught up with Dr. Smart at Cedar Meadow Farm in Holtwood, Wednesday, August 21.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dr. Larry Smart from Cornell University, welcome to Lancaster County. How are you doing?
I’m doing great, Eric. It’s great to be here in Lancaster. It’s my first time down here.
What are some of your impressions of the county itself?
Oh, it’s beautiful farmland. I’ll just say the roads here are twisty and turny. We’re used to straighter roads in the Finger Lakes, but the landscape is just spectacular.
On the Hemp Circuit we saw several Cornell varieties. How do the varieties look to you here in Lancaster?
Yeah. So we’re very pleased with these two varieties from our breeding program that have been produced with initial funding from New York State and more recent funding from the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, with matching funds from International Hemp.
We have trademarked the name Ursa to cover all of our varieties that we produce in the Cornell breeding program. Ursa is the Latin name for bear, which is our our mascot.
So these first two varieties, Ursa Ulta is our fiber variety and Ursa Grande is our grain and dual purpose variety.
We have been trialing those with our academic colleagues around the country this year. And anecdotally, this season, they’re doing very well. But it was nice to see them here at Kings Seed and again at the Penn State research station. They are late flowering varieties. So they’re very tall now. And it looks like our initial yield estimates from our trials are going to hold up across multiple regions.
Talk to me about those yields. What are you looking at grain-wise per acre.
Yeah. So optimistically, we would hope for more than 2,000 pounds to the acre from grain and four tons to the acre of straw.
Which is a game changer, right?
Yeah. So four tons to the acre is a very good yield for a dedicated fiber variety. But if a farmer can also capture 2,000 pounds of grain—and it’s a large seeded variety so that grain will be large and easy to de-hull—then again I think it will be very attractive, if you have the ability to do that dual purpose harvest from a very tall variety.
For Ulta, our estimates are that it will yield as high as eight tons to the acre. So again, if our typical yields are four tons or five tons, if we can get up to 7 or 8 tons per acre, that brings profit to the farmer.
But raises some questions about harvesting.
For the fiber, we have not had trouble harvesting it. For the grain, when it’s up there nine, ten feet tall, for that grain, you have to have some kind of specialized equipment that puts your combine header up that tall.
I have regularly faced these issues in my breeding programs of how does the engineer handle the high yield that we’re producing in our breeding program?
And I just throw it back at the engineer and I say, “Figure it out. This is your problem now.”
One last question. Thoughts on the recent AAFCO vote for hemp seed meal as an ingredient for laying hens?
It is a game changer. It is breaking down the bricks in the dike that we need to get this flood of interest. It’s a huge market. I think the product will be very attractive to animal producers. I’m not an animal nutritionist, but everything I read is that it’s going to be a great ingredient for a number of animals.
At Cornell, we are about to initiate three new animal feeding studies for dairy cows, horses and broiler chickens. So we continue to provide the data that we need to add more and more registrations and be able to feed hemp seed meal to additional animals.
I will say, in my breeding program, it is a target to reduce the risk to growers of meeting those standards of two parts per million THC and 20 parts per million CBD.
Our solution to that is to breed high CBG lines that are effectively zero THC grain varieties so that testing for THC will become a non-issue.
Again, give me that challenge as a plant breeder and I will do my best to address it.
And then you’ve got a field day coming up. Is it the second week of September?
Yes. We have actually multiple field days in a row.
On September 11th, our colleagues at the USDA Hemp Germplasm Repository are having an open house to look at their trials. Incredible diversity, they’ve been able to collect already in just a few years.
The Cornell Grain and Fiber Hemp Field Day is Thursday, September 12th. We welcome everyone to that. We will have harvesting and baling demonstrations, as well as a demonstration of our Fiber Cut 660 decorticator.
And on Friday, my colleague Daniela Vergara is hosting our high cannabinoid field day.
So three field days in a row if you want to spend a beautiful week in the Finger Lakes.
Dr. Smart, thank you so much.
Thank you.
To hear the original interview, check out Part One of our Hemp Circuit coverage on the Lancaster Farming Industrial Hemp Podcast:
”}]] Cornell hemp geneticist Larry Smart talks varieties, hemp seed meal, field days, and his affinity for the back country roads of Lancaster County. Read More