Hemp farmer Rod Flaman of Edenwold, Saskatchewan, is a part of Canada’s Hemp History. He first started growing hemp about ten years ago, despite scepticism from his neighbours.
He took over his father’s farm in 1981, and started out growing wheat. However, after several years of being a wheat farmer, he reached the conclusion that wheat would never make him a lot of money, and he began investigating other more specialised crops. This is how he discovered hemp.
Industrial hemp production became legal in Canada in 1998, and Flaman took the plunge and planted his first hemp crop. At the time there wasn’t much of a market for hemp, resulting in overproduction amongst the few farmers who were growing it, so Flaman bowed out… for the time being.
Many years later, the economic potential of hemp grew, and he’s been growing hemp every year since. To give an idea of the financial value of hemp, Flaman recently sold hemp seed for $1 per pound, compared to feed barley which yielded only 21 cents per pound.
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