The Ballad of Bud the Hemp Farmer
When hemp got freed up federally, Bud saw his long-held dream materialize - finally he could cultivate this misunderstood historian plant pioneered by the Founding Fathers he revered. He dove in headfirst, planting acre after acre of cannabidiol-rich hemp.
The first years proved bountiful, the versatile crop's popularity booming for everything from fibers to extracts to essential oils. Pride swelled in Bud as his harvests rippled out, benefiting people's lives across the country. He smiled imagining the Fathers nod approvingly.
Soon Bud's state legalized recreational cannabis. After ensuring compliance boundaries, he expanded modestly into this new adjacent frontier, bolstering regional access to plant medicine. His operation began truly thriving, optimism higher than his homegrown Everest Kush.
But one morning dread crept in as Bud read a mystifying dispatch - the USDA was revoking his federal hemp license due to his recent state cannabis activities somehow violating their policies. No further explanation given. His stomach knotted imagining the catastrophic losses ahead.
Bud re-read the opaque injunction over and over until his eyes glazed. Where was due process? How could a distant bureaucracy sabotage his sovereign state's laws this way without warning or recourse?
It smacked of the same arbitrary overreach and coercion the Founders seceded from Crown rule to escape. Yet here the new federal government inhaled authority to quash pioneer industries and livelihoods without accountability. Bud's faith in freedom wavered.
"But our Constitution enlightened history by enshrining harvest liberties the Fathers fought for..." Bud muttered aloud. "Life and property sacrosanct". He sighed grievously, gazing over fields indicating that truth now lay ravaged too.
So Bud the Hemp Farmer sits heart-weary on his tractor, gazing over wavering crops he can no longer legally tend, lamenting the impotence of paper rights against tidal power. Wondering how divine freedom venerated in theory continues facing betrayal in practice even now...
Now let us examine closer this real happening currently victimizing rural cannabis farmers pursuing the agrarian way - the American way - coast to coast. Why must these revolutionary plants remain so needlessly controversial and restricted from inhabitants of the land of the free? What of natural law before human law...
What's Happening with the USDA and Hemp Farmers?
A peculiar regulatory crackdown has blindsided hemp farmers in certain states, costing them licenses and livelihoods after entering newly legal state cannabis industries.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversees hemp cultivation regulation nationally per the 2018 Farm Bill's provisions removing non-psychoactive hemp from Controlled Substances Act purview.
While 33 states administer their own USDA-approved hemp oversight programs with licenses, a few rely on direct USDA management, including Vermont and Mississippi.
Under this federal licensing, home cultivators like Sam Bellavance successfully grew boutique hemp crops for years, benefiting regional access to CBD medicines. But recently, a frightening pattern emerged.
In both Vermont and Mississippi, pioneer hemp farmers choosing to expand strategically into their state's fledgling recreational or medical cannabis market suddenly faced termination of their federal hemp licenses by USDA decree without explanation. Despite wholly distinct licensing clearly separating activities.
This sudden non-negotiable forfeiture threatens catastrophic loss of harvest investments and revenue flow without recourse. Bellavance estimates a $250,000 personal blow while his farm faces bankruptcy.
Yet curiously some state-administered USDA hemp programs like Colorado foresaw this potential expansion issue, establishing firm boundaries for separate cannabis versus hemp operations rather than restrictive blanket termination as enforcement mechanism.
Why this contradictory aggressive tactic leaving law-abiding businesses stranded by irrational federal intervention beyond jurisdiction? When contacted for clarification on rationale, USDA simply provided vague platitudes about navigating complex jurisdictional nuances but remained opacity on reasoning.
Attorneys advise the unilateral muscle-flexing devoid of communication or statute grounding leaves USDA vulnerable for lawsuits from aggrieved farmers lacking options. But litigation proves costly and lengthy, leaving real families distressed urgently.
Mississippi farmer Eric Sorenson relates his cruel predicament after receiving medical cannabis licensing - "It doesn’t make any sense, it’s the same plant.” Yet antiquated perceptions in Washington invoke Reefer Madness fears conflating all cannabis subspecies. Definitive science be damned.
In Missouri, aspiring medical cannabis grower Chris Beerman received spontaneous warning that USDA would rescind his hemp license if he dared apply for state recreational permitting - effectively extortion denying him economic liberty other states enjoy freely.
What becomes clear is prohibition's lingering grasp breeding market unpredictability and unnecessary suffering from political disconnect with commonsense industry integration. Yet public representatives remained unaware this landed hardship plagued constituents at all.
How To Solve The USDA Hemp Problem Once And For All
While the USDA could rectify this immediate hemp licensing debacle through consistent state-federal cooperation, the arbitrary interference spotlights the urgent need for ending prohibition's regulatory dysfunction altogether.
For a temporary bandaid, the USDA should defer cannabis oversight fully to state agencies in legalized regions rather than sabotaging progress through distant bureaucratic power grabs insensitive to real-world needs. Cannabis governance proves inherently local.
Federal legislators could also statutorily protect interstate commerce around legal hemp and state cannabis, preventing agency overreach. Though patchwork policy still fails holistically.
Better yet, Congress should deschedule cannabis plant products entirely from the Controlled Substances Act, recognizing outdated misclassifications worsen problems tenfold. Healing plants never belonged designated Schedule 1 beside heroin and LSD, lacking medical utility or safety as the FDA itself confirmed.
Full federal cannabis legalization allows farmers seamlessly cultivating economic and therapeutic abundance for society without second-guessing hostile whims of federal agencies. The golden path forward shimmers clearly as ever more regions end senseless prohibition successfully despite bureaucratic addiction to it.
Because ultimately the Controlled Substances Act itself represents the original sin cursing botanical freedom and breeding regulatory chaos. Its very premises enact religious fundamentalism and corporate protectionism, not reason, compassion or science.
This law anomalously empowers pharmaceutical monopolies to commodify cures through isolationist medical dogma, belying intrinsically safe holistic plant synergies refined over eons through collective human trial and error.
It embodies a reductionist power grab to concentrate nature's secrets into proprietary formulas for elite wealth accretion above universal wellbeing. The people bear no moral obligation obeying illegitimate institutional overreach.
Hence the foundational solution for farmers long-persecuted involves dismantling this unethical prohibition regime completely. No just healthcare or agricultural system denies farmers agency over their sovereign land for growing natural god-given plants. That constitutes high crime against individual and Earth liberties.
The sticky truth remains - either Americans stand with courage today reclaiming freedom's first principles or continue suffering incremental overreach eroding liberty's last shreds. Prohibition by definition cannot balance competing stakeholder interests. It proves philosophically irrational and thus pragmatically unworkable.
This is why the only way forward out of this predicament is to completely dismantle the machinery, and rebuild from the ground up. The fact of the matter is that the system we have was ushered in by deceptions and backdoor meetings. Prohibition does not benefit the greater good, it does not make the world safer – it only serves to stifle the independent free thinking people of the world, place them in a system that a central authority can decide your fate without any real pushback.
It seems, that prohibition is the core cancer in this whole problem and the only thing we can do with cancer is to cut it out lest the whole body succumbs to it.
The Sticky Bottom Line
Beneath debates around "legal hemp" languishes a philosophical crisis point - what enlightened liberties and self-evident human rights truly constitute the American experiment our visionary Founders died ensuring? Are we beholden crown subjects or sovereign beings?
Because permitting agencies to veto without warning our participating in lawful state markets for growing versatile heirloom crops shaped this nation's fabric contravenes fundamental principles birthed in revolution.
Hemp herself stands sentry honoring that seminal struggle for autonomy from imperial overreach on home soil. Her hardy stalk cut colonial ropes binding seafaring fortunes to servitude. Clothed pioneers taming wilderness, rigged wagons rolling west, penned constitutions consecrating freedom as divine inheritance never the crown's to permit or deny voters.
Thomas Paine declared the greatest tyrannies forged not upon actions but omissions - glimpsing how prohibiting life, liberty and livelihood proves the profoundest despotism. What could exceed ruthlessness of denying citizens economic sovereignty over their land's bounty by executive fiat?
Henry David Thoreau yet reminds even the best government but a necessary evil without strict limitations. So who deputized USDA in hubris to contravene state law unilaterally shattering farmers who sought only contributing their gifts through botanical enterprise free of harm?
The sticky truth confronts us that prohibition's perversions infect every treaty, agency and court arrogating authority meant checked and localized. But natural law supersedes human law, and the greatest crime iterating is normalized aggression against individual and Earth. No just social contract honors that.
So shall we muster the civil courage ennobling those who came before or resign generations more to unlawful search and seizure from soil-less lab coated cohorts leveraging bad science and fear for anti-freedom? The choice endures eternal as Fathers smile or mourn from mythic graves awaiting the mythic chime heralding truth's torch passing. But destiny turns now on whether hearts hardened by false Security bend then crack then open fierce to meet this ripening hour with spirits vestal as the first Sons of Liberty. Let freedom ring!
HEMP FARMERS'S PROBLEMS, READ ON...
