Hemp farmers are taking a shot in the dark as they start preparing their farms for the 2026 planting season.
If Congress does not take any action to reverse the hemp ban passed as part of the funding legislation to end the November 2025 government shutdown, the hemp industry as it is today will become obsolete, leaving hemp farmers nowhere to sell their harvest.
The language, included in the agriculture minibus, sets a limit of 0.4 milligrams of total hemp-derived THC per container that will go into effect on Nov. 12, 2026, aimed at rooting out intoxicating levels of hemp and bad actors in the market. The cap is a drastic change from the current law passed in the 2018 farm bill, which established a threshold of hemp with less than 0.3% THC, meaning three milligrams in a typical serving.
As Luke Niforatos, the executive vice president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a nonprofit organization that has guided lawmakers on the topic of hemp regulation, told the Washington Examiner, the new milligram cap has the effect of “effectively banning the vast majority of intoxicating hemp products on the market.”
But hemp industry advocates have said the language is existential, warning that the language will do more than just root out bad actors: it will effectively wipe out 95% of the currently legal hemp products on the shelves for consumers.
HEMP INDUSTRY BRACES FOR UPHEAVAL THANKS TO LITTLE-NOTICED BUDGET PROVISION
As thousands of hemp farmers across the country prepare for planting season, they are sounding the alarm, worried that if Congress does nothing to change the impending November ban, they may be growing industrial hemp with no market to sell to.
Fifth-generation Kentucky farmer Jay Grundy told the Washington Examiner that his hemp farm has already begun turning ground over for its 2026 planting season, rolling the dice as he awaits to see if Congress acts before November.
“We are 100% taking a gamble moving forward,” Grundy said. “All the money that I’m spending currently, I could very likely lose here in a couple of months. And that scares me to death. We’re not quite ready to give up yet because there’s still time.”
U.S. hemp farmers typically plant in mid-May to early-June. Farms needed to file worker contracts for their H-2A visa temporary agricultural workers 90 days before they start, meaning those farmers who plan to plant in 2026 have already filed and begun to plant.
“We’ve actively started at this point,” Grundy continued. “Seed harvest has been done. H-2A contracts have been put into place. Both local and H-2A laborers come in around June 1. We’ll be planting around June 15, and then, essentially, from June 15 all the way until Sept. 15, it’s a full-on labor-intensive project.”
Some hemp farmers stockpiled enough harvest for 2026 to avoid the risk of planting this season, though stockpiling itself still comes with added investment in the past.
Jeff Boogaard, a Navy veteran and hemp farmer in Loudoun County, Virginia, previously told the Washington Examiner that for his farm, “there is no 2026 planting season.”
“What am I going to do with the harvest when I finish?” Boogaard said. “We’ve already removed it from our 2026 objectives. To grow it and then to throw it is just not good business sense.”
But Grundy is banking on movement in Congress to support a bill that strips back the 2025 hemp-banning language while also regulating intoxicating hemp more than the 2018 farm bill did to root out bad actors in the industry and make industrial hemp more stable in the long term.
“We’re not a part of the synthetic market,” said Grundy, who grows for CBD and THC company Cornbread Hemp. “But the unfortunate part about all of this is the gas station weed gave us a black eye, and somehow or another, we got pulled in together with the bad actors. The farmers are saying, ‘Hey, we want regulations, and we want this cleaned up.’ We’re not the same as the gas station weed people.”
Nearly half a dozen bills have been introduced in Congress with support from the hemp industry to address the impending November ban. Some range from an extension on when the ban would go into effect to a comprehensive reform of the regulatory framework surrounding hemp.
Grundy told the Washington Examiner he believes the regulatory framework introduced by Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA) has “some very sensible language.”
Griffith’s bill creates a Food and Drug Administration oversight plan for the industry, putting the power in the FDA’s hands to set new milligram limits for hemp.
However, drug safety advocates have remained adamant that regulatory bills such as this one could have sweeping effects going beyond hemp and support the marijuana legalization movement as well. SAM CEO Kevin Sabet warned that Griffith’s regulatory bill “is a backdoor to the full federal legalization of marijuana.”
“Again and again, we hear the same argument: that we can somehow regulate our way to safety around these dangerous drugs,” Sabet said. “The Griffith bill is yet another attempt to put that over at the federal level, with all that implies.”
Sabet said Griffith’s bill is “just as destined for disaster as the state-level efforts that have come before it.”
“The data prove there is no safe way to regulate and commercialize intoxicating hemp products,” Sabet said. “Not in Ohio, where edibles have driven a hospitalization crisis among kids under 5. Not in Texas, where legal hemp-THC sent poison-control incidents for kids skyrocketing. Not in Kentucky, where the hemp disaster is crashing over young and old alike.”
On the CBD and THC sales industry side, many major actors seem to support the idea behind Griffith’s bill. Thomas Winstanley, the executive vice president of Edibles.com, voiced support for Griffith’s bill and the timeline extension bills, introduced by Rep. Jim Baird (R-IN) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), which are “important” for giving the industry more time to adjust, as well.
Winstanley called Griffith’s bill a “really wonderful starting point as a piece of draft legislation.”
“This actually starts to bring forward a framework for federal regulation,” Winstanley said. “So what I think becomes fairly critical in all of this is, now seeing that we have this extension language, which is good, but the extension language isn’t going to get momentum without some stronger federal frameworks. And now Griffith kind of helps fill that void a little bit in some ways.”
He also called a similar regulatory proposal introduced by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) a “really good bill.”
Running in the background of all of this is the fact that 2026 had been a paradoxical year for hemp and marijuana policy. Just after Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed the language hemp-banning language into law, Trump passed an executive order fast-tracking the reclassification of marijuana from a Schedule I to Schedule III substance.
As part of that executive order, he also urged new research into how hemp-derived THC and CBD products can be used for medical treatment purposes. Trump also gave his blessing to a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services pilot program allowing Medicare beneficiaries to get coverage on hemp-derived products.
This new CMS pilot program, covering up to $500 of hemp-derived CBD products for beneficiaries, went into effect on April 1. SAM and other drug-safety advocates are challenging the legality of the program in court, with a trial date set for mid-April.
As the CMS collects data on how the program works, the pilot’s success or failure could be a major litmus test for where federal hemp policy will stand come November.