The High-Stakes Race to Breed Cannabis With 0% THC

This fall, for the first time since 1970, farmers throughout the United States were set to harvest federally legal hemp. From New York to Kansas to Oregon, they had applied for licenses to plant nearly half-a-million acres of the non-psychoactive cannabis. Farmers had purchased seeds and tended fields throughout the summer. But toward the end of the growing season, many of them realized that their plants weren’t turning out as expected — and at worst, that their entire crop would have to be destroyed.

While the corn and soybeans had, as usual, sprouted all at once and grown to a uniform size, new hemp plants tended to grow on different schedules, to different heights. Sometimes there weren’t that many hemp plants at all, because a relatively small percentage of the seeds had sprouted. The most dramatic surprise, however, was to farmers who had intended to plant hemp with a high concentration of the chemical compound known as CBD — a potentially lucrative prospect given the ingredient’s addition to everything from lattes to pet treats — and instead ended up growing what the federal government classifies as…