2020 Spring Farm Outlook

2020 Logan County Farm Outlook LINCOLN DAILY NEWS March 19, 2020 Page 25 the University of Illinois. He says Halloween pumpkins did not do as well, but even those harvests were still better than expected. Some farmers branched out into a new specialty crop last year: hemp. The year 2019 was the first for legal hemp production in the state, and a report by Dana Cronin of Illinois Newsroom shares some of those experiences. Many farmers experienced frustration with growing a new crop. “It’s kind of a good way to start, in that that’s about as bad as it can get,” says Jeff Cox, Bureau Chief of Medicinal Plants at the Illinois Department of Agriculture. “There’s a lack of expertise, just a general lack of knowledge as to how to grow hemp the best way.” Cronin writes that a lot of hemp farmers soon learned that after they harvested their crop, they had nowhere to take it. “I have 5,000 pounds of biomass sitting in my garage, taking up a whole stall of the two-stall garage,” says Charles Brown, a hemp grower in Virginia, Illinois. Another problem came in the form of licensing. Cronin cites the Illinois Department of Agriculture, who says that 644 growers licenses were issued in 2019, but fewer than 200 processors were licensed. Additionally, a generational divide has caused some friction with hemp crops. Older farmers associate hemp with marijuana in a negative manner, and believe it is just as harmful. Younger farmers are more likely to at least try and grow the crop, despite the difficulties. Even with these troubles, many hemp farmers are ready to try again this year and learning from this past experience. In order to help these farms, such as the apple orchards, the peach farms, the pumpkin patches, and the hemp farmers (and all the others), specialty crops are being added to lists of various supporting programs. One of these programs comes from digital-agriculture company Farmers Edge, who has begun offering its imagery and mapping technology for specialty crops. According to a news release, “the FarmCommand technology integrates four imagery-derived map layers (NDVI, Scouting, Variation, and Health Change Maps), cloud filtering technology, and field-centric weather for growers to accurately identify, predict, and respond to issues before yield is impacted.” Continue 4