EDMONTON—Brian Rozmahel, a 59-year-old mild-mannered hemp farmer in Viking, Alta., remembers when he would get teased about his crops in the small town’s coffee shops and curling club.

Now he sees himself as a pioneer in a budding industry. And it’s all thanks to legalization.

“The first field of hemp that I grew, because it does look like marijuana, there was sort of a rebellious streak to me that went, ‘Wow, look what I’m doing!’” Rozmahel said from his farm in Viking, where he grows almost 400 acres of hemp plants.

“People still stop on the highway and take a selfie.”

But new federal laws mean Rozmahel doesn’t have to situate his fields one kilometre away from schools and churches, and he also has a new revenue stream because he can sell the plants and leaves to cannabis producers.

“It was difficult to even study cannabis because it was an illegal product … now we can harvest this stuff and process it,” Rozmahel said.

The change is creating new opportunities for Alberta farmers and industry when it comes to hemp production, because it means cannabidiol can now be extracted from cannabis flowers and leaves. Farmers previously had to throw those materials away.

They may now sell the plants and leaves to licensed producers, such as Aurora Cannabis, which can use the raw material to extract and sell CBD. CBD is a non-psychoactive cannabinoid increasing in popularity because it reportedly helps with pain, anxiety and insomnia and more.

The burgeoning industry prompted Edmonton’s NorQuest College to announce Monday that it was building an online hemp farming course, based on feedback from an engagement project where stakeholders identified it as an industry of interest. The course will teach everything from growing hemp, the impacts of climate and weather, to harvesting and handling.

Legalization is proving particularly important for the Leduc-Nisku Industrial Park, an area that was hit hard by the 2014 oil recession. The departure of companies that traditionally serviced the oil and gas sector led to a 15 per cent vacancy rate in the park for 2015-16.

But those properties are now increasingly being scooped up by industrial cannabis companies and being repurposed into production facilities. Aurora Cannabis is leading the way with its 800,000-square-foot facility near Edmonton International Airport, but there’s another cannabis-related venture that hasn’t been made public that county officials say will create 300 jobs.

In the last year alone, Leduc County has approved four development permits for cannabis-related uses — two for production facilities and two for retail facilities. Three of those permits involved property purchases.

Other cannabis-related companies operating in Leduc County include: Inkubate Packaging, which makes packaging from hemp; Radient Technologies, which extracts CBD from raw plant matter; and HempCo, which is currently building a 56,000-square-foot production facility. It will be the largest such facility in the country.

HempCo Food and Fiber, based in Vancouver with another production facility in Manitoba, originally focused on hemp hearts, hemp protein and hemp oil as food products.

“Previously, we just produced food, but now we’re going to be using (hemp) stalks to produce fibre,” said HempCo CEO Diane Jang. “Whole plant utilization, to me, is a game-changer.”

HempCo is also expanding into consumer-packaged goods and even an animal supplement line made from hemp.

Jang said a global market study forecasts the hemp industry would be worth $2.2 billion annually within five years — and that’s before CBD extraction is thrown into the mix.

Other hemp applications include processing the seeds into food and using the stalks for bale (straw) and fibre. Hemp fibre is a raw material that has a wide variety of applications, from textiles to cosmetics to manufacturing.

“The fibre can then be combined with other resins. It can be very solid, so people are making skateboards (out of hemp),” said Barbara McKenzie, executive director of the Leduc-Nisku Economic Development Association.

McKenzie said cannabis legalization is proving to be a boon for an industrial park traditionally focused on the oil and gas sector.

“It’s going somewhat back to our roots in agriculture, and using our innovation and our know-how and our entrepreneurial skills from the oil and gas industry … to create a whole new diversified industry for us,” McKenzie said.

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In addition to Aurora Cannabis, Inkubate Packaging and HempCo, McKenzie said there are five additional hemp- and cannabis-related opportunities for the county in the pipeline.

“There will be completely new jobs that no one has ever thought of before that will be becoming available in that industry,” McKenzie said.

“As these deals come to fruition in the next 12 to 18 months, I think we’ll see Nisku change a little bit. One of the things we’ve all really looked at doing … is kind of change the face of the area,” she said.

Jang says HempCo chose Leduc County for its new production facility because it’s close to partners such as Aurora Cannabis (Aurora holds a 52.7 per cent stake in HempCo), as well as its network of about 30 farmers. They’ve budgeted for about 20 employees at the new facility, many of them former oil and gas workers.

“A lot of the employees that come from the (oil and gas) industry find this industry more stable,” Jang said. “We have a lot of millennials that work for us.”

Rozmahel said he expects more conventional farmers in Alberta will embrace hemp, because it has a good economical return, is resilient and is resistant to diseases such as clubroot.

“Someone just dropped gold in the Klondike and word got out … there’s all sorts of people rushing thinking they’re going to make millions,” he said.

And it turns out central Alberta, especially the area surrounding Edmonton, is an ideal growing climate for hemp because of its long, sunny days and plentiful black top soil.

“The resiliency of this crop has a lot of farmers interested … It’s an amazing diversification opportunity for Alberta,” McKenzie said. “It’s an opportunity for us to add value to what we produce here rather than just growing it and shipping it out.”

That opportunity will only expand as the food and beverage industry increasingly adds hemp to products. And farmers like Rozmahel believe things will really take off when big pharma gets involved with CBD.

“I think we’re going to see a real explosion,” McKenzie said.

Canada’s ability to ship cannabis products globally, Alberta’s open market system, and Edmonton’s proximity to roads, rails and runways create an opportunity for the region to be a world leader in the hemp industry, she said.

“We need to shift and change to be a resilient province and continue to take part in the world economy,” McKenzie said. “We’re seeing Edmonton rise to the top of its field in behavioural artificial intelligence, so why can’t we be the leaders in cannabis and hemp as well?”

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