Hempseed remains forbidden to feed to livestock from a regulator’s perspective. While other oilseeds and grains were being accepted as long-used, safe feed ingredients over the past century, hemp was banished from the marketplace as part of cannabis prohibition. This retarded agronomic research and feeding trials that established entrenched feed ingredients like corn, soy, and various byproducts.

Later, there was no impetus to seek regulatory approval for feeding hempseed and derivatives to livestock. There was no legal hemp industry, no domestic supply chain, and no mounting inventories of hempseed meal from crushing operations that primed a gray market for the high-protein, high-fat oilseed meal. 

Regulatory approval for feeding hempseed to laying hens is somewhere on the horizon, but this is only one derivative, for one class of poultry, among several species of livestock. T…