PRAIRIE BAND POTAWATOMI RESERVATION – Hundreds of huge, round bales lay arranged in neat rows and stacks outside Prairie Band Ag’s processing facility north of Topeka.
At just under 6 feet in diameter, they weighed about 1,000 pounds each. At a glance, they looked like any other hay bale dotting the Kansas countryside.
“ It’s baled using the same baler and everything,” said Zach Gill, the production manager at the tribally owned company. “If you can bale corn silage or corn stalks, you can bale hemp.”
Prairie Band Ag’s hemp bales are destined to become a wide variety of products, including compostable forks, spill absorbents and horse bedding. The company even produced its first bioplastics this fall.
And soon, Kansas State University and Habitat for Humanity of the Northern Flint Hills will finish building a low-energy house in Ogden that’s partly insulated with Prairie Band Ag hemp.
These are the signs of momentum as the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation cuts a path for itself in this industry. It is growing, processing and finding markets for a crop that the U.S. legalized in 2018 and that Prairie Band Ag first planted in 2020.
“The first couple years was a lot of trial and error,” Gill said. “We did have some hiccups, we did have some learning curves.”
But company leaders and workers stuck with it. They believe in the potential of what they say is a particularly resilient crop — one that’s performing well for them without any insecticide or plowing and with relatively little herbicide and fertilizer.
“I care about the environment,” said Anthony Hale, a production hand and member of the tribe. “And with this here, I think we’re helping the environment.”
Diving into a new industry
When the federal government began allowing hemp production, the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation put careful consideration into entering the market.
“Being first to do anything, there’s that risk associated with it,” Gill said.
It meant not just testing a new crop but also spending on equipment. The tribe aimed not just to grow hemp, but to set up shop as one of the region’s first processors.
“ The tribe has significantly invested in the industrial processing side,” Gill said. “Well before a lot of people even knew what the crop was — they challenged themselves and they got the backing that they needed and they got the votes that they needed.”
Next it set about figuring out which products would pay the bills and generate revenue for the tribe.
Prairie Band Ag made an initial foray into growing the variety of hemp used for cannabidiol (CBD) products, but that market has fared poorly in Kansas, so it pivoted.
Now it grows a variety well-suited for a different market. Production hand and tribe member Jalen Leclere held up a whole, dried hemp plant to show off its traits.
The stiff, lanky plant towered above him. It stood 12 feet tall, with surprisingly few branches and leaves, which were clustered toward the top.
It’s mostly stalk, which yields hemp fiber. The leaves don’t get used.
Prairie Band Ag feeds its bales into a machine that separates the stalks into two parts: the stringy outside layer called bast and the pithy inside called hurd.
Both have many uses.
For example, bast can become textiles or a kind of wall and ceiling insulation that looks somewhat like fiberglass batts. Hurd can be made into single-use cutlery or into hempcrete, the kind of building insulation K-State is making with Prairie Band Ag hemp.
Prairie Band Ag sells both bast and hurd, but mostly hurd.
The company chops and mills its hurd to different sizes for different buyers.
Coarser pieces with the feel of straw make great bedding for rabbits and horses. Smaller confetti-like strips might go into hempcrete. The finest textures — with a feel like flour or sawdust — work for bioplastics or pellets that can absorb spilled liquids.
“We tried it also on the cat box and it worked good,” Melchior said.
Prairie Band Ag continues to develop new products, with a particular focus on bioplastics. That’s because simply chopping up hemp for horse bedding isn’t going to pay the bills, Gill said.
“That’s a hard hill to climb,” he said, whereas putting in the time and effort to develop more products such as cutlery offers better revenue.
So this fall, Prairie Band Ag test-produced its first batch of compostable cutlery, straws and golf tees made entirely from finely milled hurd and plant resin. It now sells the straws and cutlery in bulk.
The company also created a brand for its bioplastics: Mnokiwèn. It means “good earth” in Potawatomi and is pronounced similar to the English words “no key when,” Gill said.
The rise of bioplastics
The rise of bioplastics, an industry that now includes major international corporations, has started to draw concerns in recent years about truth in advertising.
“That was one of my biggest fears getting into bioplastics,” Gill said. “I wanted to make sure that what we claim is fact and it’s not greenwashing.”
Some products marketed as plant-based actually use traditional plastic from the oil and gas industry. Coca-Cola took flak, for example, for its “PlantBottle” made primarily of traditional plastic and containing less than one-third plant content.
Also, some bioplastics marketed as biodegradable can’t be composted and require special facilities to break them down. And some are made from crops farmed with heavy chemical applications.
Prairie Band Ag decided to tackle these issues by working on home-compostable bioplastics and by farming with a suite of conservation techniques that are meant to protect the soil and use fewer chemicals. This approach to farming goes by different names, including regenerative agriculture.
“All of our bioplastics resemble what we truly believe,” Gill said. “It’s a better alternative for nature, for the soils and for the environment.”
Prairie Band Ag’s single-use straws, forks and knives are tan in color, but feel texture-wise like their traditional plastic equivalents. The company says they break down in a backyard compost bin or heap within about half a year. It found a local manufacturer to mix its hurd with plant resin and zero traditional plastic.
Meanwhile, the company continues to tweak how it grows its hemp in hopes of minimizing the toll on the land.
The hemp is grown without irrigation, insecticide or plowing and the soil isn’t left bare over the winter.
“ We are true no-till,” said Zane Johnson said, an agronomist with Crop Quest who helps Prairie Band Ag hone its approach. And “we go in with a cover crop for weed suppression over the winter.”
Foregoing the plowing and using cover crops helps to improve soil and slow down erosion. It also helps keep fertilizer nutrients in the fields, so they don’t run off and pollute waterways. (Nitrogen and phosphorus pollution fuels toxic algae blooms in lakes and the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.)
Johnson estimates hemp acres make up just 1% of the farming he consults on, but he quickly developed a passion for Prairie Band Ag’s project and goals.
The tribe wants to stay away from chemical fertilizer, he said, and did for a few years before deciding the plants needed some help getting established in the spring.
Now Johnson and Prairie Band Ag are working on a plan to incorporate legumes such as hairy vetch in winter to add nitrogen to the field naturally.
As for herbicide, Prairie Band Ag also tries to minimize that. Its cover crops help suppress weeds. When it’s time to make way for hemp, the company uses roller-crimping combined with herbicide to kill the cover crops.
Prairie Band Ag would also like to incorporate cattle grazing, Johnson said. This practice lets cattle feed on cover crops and in the process, benefits the soil. But this step will require working out some logistics, he said. For example, cattle shouldn’t eat hairy vetch.
Hale said part of the Native American mindset toward environment is thinking about living with the land, instead of just living on it. He likes being part of an effort to grow a crop and turn out products with less environmental impact.
“(Pollution) has an effect on everybody,” he said, and if not addressed, then “eventually, it’s going to trickle down to the younger generations and all my grandchildren.”
The hemp crop in Kansas and nationally
Leclere likes working with hemp for a few reasons.
He enjoys getting a close-up view of a new industry.
“It’s a huge opportunity,” he said. “Seeing the way it gets built up — in an agricultural and business standpoint.”
He also likes the rhythm of the work, feeding hemp bales through processing equipment, following it through the milling stages and troubleshooting any mechanical hiccups.
“There’s just a lot of movement,” he said, “Got to make sure that equipment is running smoothly.”
Hemp remains a small crop in Kansas, but it doubled in acreage from 2023 to 2024.
Recent changes to federal law may put a stop later this year to the production of ingestible THC products from hemp. That doesn’t apply to Prairie Band Ag because it doesn’t produce those products. However, some industry experts in other states have voiced concern that the federal change could inadvertently hurt the nation’s growing hemp fiber and textile industry.
In 2024, Kansas growers planted 2,150 acres, making the state a top 10 grower of hemp outdoors. (In general, hemp grown in this manner is for grain and fiber. Hemp grown in greenhouses is generally for the CBD or THC market.)
Nationally, about 45,000 acres were planted in 2024 — miniscule compared to top commodity crops, such as corn and soybeans. But the country’s hemp acreage jumped more than 60% from a year earlier.
The USDA pegged the value of US industrial hemp production at $445 million for 2024.
Prairie Band Ag hopes that by growing hemp itself and milling it itself, it can keep costs down and offer attractive prices for its hurd and its finished products, such as cutlery.
The company doesn’t just have to stay competitive compared to other hemp processors — it has to compete with the traditional plastic industry.
Prairie Band Ag can’t beat that industry on price alone, so it hopes to convince buyers such as Kansas restaurants that a local product that supports local farmers is worth paying a bit more.
“You get that Kansas-made product,” Gill said, “and you get the sustainability.”
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is the environment reporter for the Kansas News Service and host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust. You can follow her on Bluesky or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.
The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio.
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