WAKONDA, S.D. (KELO) — As you drive west out of Wakonda on Slant Street, you no sooner leave behind houses in town than you’re greeted by waving fields of hemp on the north side of the road.
“You get a lot of marijuana farmer references,” laughed John Peterson, owner of Dakota Hemp. “You do get some questions about the middle of the summer — people asking what in the heck are you growing out there — it just looks like a horribly weedy field, but the only weeds are the ones we planted out there.”
Peterson is in his fourth season planting hemp in South Dakota, along with his Chief Operations Officer, Karll Lecher. The two say that over the the four seasons they’ve been planting hemp, they’ve learned a lot, with new challenges cropping up each year.
Despite the jokes from neighbors, Peterson says the operation has gotten a lot of support from the community.
Overall, the growing season for hemp sits around 4 months for Dakota Hemp, depending on what they are growing the product for.
The hemp that Peterson and Lecher grow has been used for things such as animal bedding and building insulation, though these uses of hemp expand outward to things such as textiles, flooring and more. Dakota Hemp also has its own line of CBD products.
KELOLAND News spent three hours in the hemp fields with Johnson and Lecher, as well as South Dakota Industrial Hemp Association Ken Meyer, who runs a hemp processing operation near Winfred, South Dakota.
While in the field, we learned about the growth process, the parts of the plant, the challenges of the industry and more, which we will be exploring in a short series of stories over the coming days.
