On Jan. 19 USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service published the final version of the rule clarifying regulations for the production of hemp in the United States. The 2018 farm bill legalized the production of hemp as an agricultural commodity and removed it from the list of controlled substances. In October 2019, USDA released the text of its interim final rule for regulations, establishing a domestic hemp production program. Since this was an interim final rule, it went into effect immediately upon being published in the Federal Register. Many agricultural organizations, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, submitted comments on the interim final rule by the January 2020 deadline. In its final rule, USDA incorporated some of the suggestions that came in through the various comment periods and applied some of the lessons learned over the previous few years of growing hemp. Several of these changes will ease the regulatory burden on hemp farmers as they become effective on March 22.
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