With hemp cultivation now underway in New Mexico, researchers and students at New Mexico State University are embarking on new studies to help crop growers produce high-quality strains suitable for marketplaces.
In one project, students in Geno Picchioni’s upper-division greenhouse management class in NMSU’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences grew hemp cultivars in a supervised classroom setting as part of a research project last fall.
The 2018 United States farm bill removed hemp from the federal government’s most restrictive classification of controlled substances, which paved the way for American farmers to cultivate and distribute hemp as an agricultural product. Hemp, a variety of Cannabis sativa, is commonly grown for industrial uses but must contain less than 0.3 percent of THC, the psychoactive ingredient of cannabis.