In this July 5, 2018 photo, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell inspects a piece of hemp taken from a bale of hemp at a processing plant in Louisville, Ky. McConnell led the push in Congress to legalize hemp.Advocates have for years fought to liberate hemp from its taboo status, dating back to 1937 when it was lumped in with pot in the. Not only does today's commercially approved industrial hemp contain a scant .
In March, Leafly released a jobs report for the legal marijuana industry, stating that it now employs 211,000 full-time workers, 64,389 of them hired in 2018 alone. The data were compiled prior to the Farm Bill passage, however, too soon to quantify hemp-specific jobs, Barcott explained. Yet many jobs in both industries should be comparable, as should pay scales.
Whereas legal marijuana is expansively regulated — from seed to sale, as they say in the cannabis world — hemp will enjoy less stringent oversight, since its no longer classified as a drug, potentially attracting a much wider variety of established and start-up companies. Canopy Growth, a publicly traded cannabis company in Canada, which legalized recreational pot last year, wasted no time after President Donald Trump signed the Farm Bill just before last Christmas.