How Much Land Is Needed For Hemp Farming?

Once dried, hemp has many unique qualities that may not come to mind when you think of a plant.

Hemp fibers can be used to make clothes, shoes, paper, rope and textiles as well as industrial products such as bioplastics, insulation and biofuel.

That’s a long and varied list and is a large part of the reason hemp is in such a high demand. But around 90% of hemp plants are grown to harvest their buds, which are them used to produce CBD.

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How Much Land Is Needed For Hemp Farming?

The first thing to consider if you’re looking into farming hemp is location. The leafy plants themselves are quite easy to grow. The best land would consist of flat fields where there are plenty of hot days and cool nights and a relatively short summer. This makes the Midwest one of the most ideal sites.

Hemp is a summer crop that typically will be farmed between late June and early November.

Or perhaps you already have a few acres of land suitable for hemp farming. Hemp plants usually are quite easy to grow on an established farm or orchard that’s already cultivated for other fruits or grains or vegetables. Hemp is typically ready to harvest about four to six months after planting. This means each plant will produce the stems, leaves and buds and be ready to pick several times in a single year.

On average, you can expect to grow anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 hemp plants per acre if you have the right amount of sunlight at your chosen location.

The average hemp farm in the United States is 22 acres.

That is going to cost you around $100,000 in most States. This would put you at par with other hemp growers in the US.

Scaling Farm Businesses

Smaller-scale operations will have difficulty competing with larger farms that can offer corporations a sustained superior volume of crops, but smaller farms can often compete by maximizing the amount of care and quality of their products.

When considering a hemp-farming business, you'll need to account for scaling costs per-acreage.

Farms on larger properties have the ability to generate more revenue, but with that revenue comes operating costs, labor costs, and equipment strain.

If you're considering a hands-on approach towards a hemp farming business as opposed to the passive business model a farmland investor leverages, these trade-offs bear a lot more weight and consequence.

When building and operating your own hemp farming business, usually you can't just add more acres onto a plot of farmland – the surrounding properties are often also used by local farms owned by competing operations.

Instead, you'll need to purchase an entire second property, potentially selling the first farm property and uprooting your entire operations over.

Thus, taking extra time to consider the various implications of your farm size on your day-to-day business operations, as well as minimum-viable equipment and labor force needed to ensure that you can maximize the acreage in active production.

You wouldn't want to find yourself in a situation where you paid for a property your business couldn't scale up to maximize the production output – you'd be losing revenue and margin, as well as seasonal tempo.

In farming operations, you'll learn a lot each season about how to maximize efficiency of the quirks and features of your specific property. During each subsequent year, you'll have new development goals for the land that usually need to be done during specific seasons, to prepare for use in the following seasons.

For example, if you have a 50-acre farm property that has 10 neglected acres covered in wild brush, and only have the operational capacity to actively farm 40-acres, it will require extra time and resources to manage that land correctly, and on-time to be ready for use next season.

If these development goals aren't taken care of quickly, they can serve to compound and drag your bottom line revenue below where it could be, unlocking capital that allows you to pay for new staff and equipment.

By purchasing the land that's correct for your business in the long term scope and “getting it right the first time”, you can save your business a slew of headaches and operational problems in the future.

Again, on the other hand, if you instead choose to invest in farmland as an investor, you don't have to deal with these business logistics.