Chad Rosen: One of the things that I think is really important for us to remember is that it comes down to how we treat our crops and how we treat our supply chain. There is a lot of crops that have deleterious effects on the soil and the environment and even the supply chain partners and farmers that are growing these crops. Hemp is a small part of a really big picture, but that really big picture is healthy if it's best balanced, just like anything else. So when I talk about balance, I'm talking about biodiversity. I'm talking about environmental stewardship, and we're talking about solutions that fit into a good rotation.

And so I think one of the hallmarks that we're seeing our new administration embrace is really related to how every sector of the economy can tackle climate change. One of the ways that the agriculture space can tackle climate change is increasing biodiversity, increasing crop rotation. We see hemp as part of a rotation in a multi-cropping system, right? One of our farmers up in Michigan is a leader in regenerative agriculture, and he's in fact going to be ROC-certified, which is Regenerative Organic Certified, this summer. He's going to be Silver certified, and one of the requirements is of course cover cropping. Another one is no or minimal till, no synthetic fertilizers, and then finally a five-crop rotation.

That five-crop rotation is really a hallmark of breaking up... Some of the benefits of having really strong rotations is you get into a system where you're breaking up pests and you're breaking up weed banks if you can have different crops that are working together and following each other. One of the crops that hemp loves to follow is legumes. It loves to follow soy. It loves to follow yellow peas. It loves to follow lentils. That's because all of those are nitrogen fixers, and it uses a lot of nitrogen. One of the things about hemp is that it has a great root system so it'll grow down and it'll break up that hard pan, it'll aerate the soil, and that allows the crop that follows it to dig deeper to find moisture and nutrients in the soil and, if it's another legume, place its nitrogen and its other minerals down deeper into the soil.

So I think that having those rotations is a hallmark. We look at hemp as being one part of an ecological system. We see the outcomes of hemp-growing and its ability to sequester carbon and then being able to lock that carbon up from the fibers in woven and non-woven applications as just being a tremendous benefit to incorporating hemp into a strong bio-diverse crop rotation.