Midwestern United States
More actions
| Midwestern United States | |
|---|---|
| ActiveGrown here in 2000 or later | |
| Location | |
| Coordinates | 42.66, -93.94 |
| Country | United States |
| Provinces/States | Illinois,Indiana,Iowa,Kansas,Michigan,Minnesota,Missouri,Nebraska,North Dakota,Ohio,South Dakota,Wisconsin |
| Area | 1,980,000 km² |
| Growing history | |
| Dated accessions | 1974 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Midwestern United States is a cannabis growing region in the United States that covers the twelve states of the Midwest, from Ohio west to North and South Dakota and Kansas. Hemp was grown there for fibre from the 1830s. In 1913 the United States Department of Agriculture's fibre botanist Lyster H. Dewey wrote that hemp was "abundant as a wild plant in many localities in western Missouri, Iowa, and in southern Minnesota", and that it was often seen by roadsides across what he called the Middle West.[1]: 294 Feral hemp, called "ditchweed", still grows there: in 2022 and 2023 researchers collected seed from 1,821 feral plants in 91 populations across twelve states, ten of them in the Midwest.[2]
Geography
The region is drawn on whole states: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin. These are the twelve Midwestern states to which a 2024 study of feral hemp limited the occurrences it used.[3] The region covers about 1,980,000 km² of plains, prairie and lake country, from the Great Lakes west across the valleys of the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Platte, and south to the Ohio; the lakes themselves are not drawn. Flora of North America lists every one of the twelve states in the principal naturalised range of Cannabis sativa in North America, and finds it best established in the prairies and plains of the centre of the continent.[4]
The Lower Missouri Valley, the hemp counties of Missouri along the Missouri River, is a growing area inside the region; hemp was grown there for fibre from the 1830s to about 1890. The country around Waupun, in Wisconsin, was one of the places where Dewey found hemp under cultivation in 1913.[1]: 294 The Kentucky hemp country, south of the Ohio, lies outside the region.
Hemp as a crop
Dewey dated the first hemp grown in Missouri to about 1835. The state produced 1,600 tons of fibre in 1840 and 12,500 tons four years later, and was expected to overtake Kentucky; hemp then proved less profitable than other crops there, and growing was given up about 1890.[1]: 292–293 Further north, hemp was first grown at Champaign, Illinois, about 1875, for a cordage mill that made twine; the mill burned and the work stopped in 1902. Men from Champaign took the crop to Fremont, Nebraska, in 1887, where it lasted until 1900, and some of them grew it at Havelock, near Lincoln, from 1895 to 1910.[1]: 293 In 1913 Dewey listed the places in the United States where hemp was then cultivated: the bluegrass region of Kentucky, the region of Waupun, northern Indiana, the neighbourhood of Lima in Ohio, and two places in California.[1]: 294
Dewey dated the first sustained American effort to breed an improved hemp to 1903, in Minnesota. From 1903 to 1909 a student from Kentucky, Fritz Knorr, and the agronomist C. P. Bull selected plants from Kentucky seed at the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station, and the strain they developed was named Minnesota No. 8. Grown at Lexington, Kentucky, in 1910 and 1911, it gave more uniform plants and better fibre than unselected Kentucky seed.[1]: 304
During the Second World War the federal government revived hemp growing for fibre.[3] A table that Ford and colleagues compiled from correspondence of the Commodity Credit Corporation and War Hemp Industries gives 60,000 acres each to Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota in 1943, 40,000 to Wisconsin and 32,000 to Indiana. In 1942 none of these states had more than 7,000 acres, the figure for Wisconsin.[3]: Supporting Information, Table 1 Wisconsin harvested its last hemp crop in 1957.[5]
Wild stands
Wild hemp was already common in Peoria County, Illinois, in the middle of the nineteenth century. In an account of the vegetation published in 1887, the botanist Frederick Brendel wrote that Cannabis sativa was "perfectly naturalized and common around Peoria in the year 1852"; Alan Haney and Benjamin Kutscheid quoted him in 1975.[6]: 2 In 1938 hemp that grew wild in Minnesota was cut in August and extracted at the Treasury Department's Narcotics Laboratory in Washington; from the extract the chemist Roger Adams of the University of Illinois isolated cannabidiol, which he named.[7] Filer notes that Oswald and Boss, in a botanical work of 1918, had counted this wild hemp as an obnoxious weed, third on their list of several dozen.[7]
In 1969 Haney and Kutscheid searched Champaign County, Illinois, an area of about 2,330 km², and found about 25 hectares of hemp in nearly 900 stands. Most grew on waste ground: fence rows, abandoned fields and the banks of streams and ditches.[6]: 3–4 They found that its seed stayed alive in the soil for no more than two or three years and that a stand did not last unless the ground was disturbed every four or five years. They judged that the plant was moving between sites within its range more than spreading, except along newly built roads and drainage channels, where mowing or spraying kept the ground open.[6]: 21–22 Timothy Plowman gathered it in June 1974 along a road below a hill prairie south of Easton, in Mason County, Illinois (Plowman s.n., Easton (1974)).
Later sources find wild hemp across the region. A Purdue Extension weed scientist wrote in 2010 that hemp "does grow wild in Indiana", where wild marijuana is called ditch weed.[8] Ford and colleagues gathered occurrences of feral hemp from herbaria, databases and three universities and kept those inside the twelve states: from 61 each in North Dakota and Ohio to 518 in Kansas.[3]: Supporting Information, Table 2 Their model placed the most suitable ground along the upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri and the Platte and on the shores of the Great Lakes, and the least suitable in northern Minnesota.[3] Collectors working with the University of Wisconsin–Madison took seed in 2022 and 2023 from plants growing by roads, railway tracks and the edges of corn and soybean fields, at sites from northern Indiana to south-eastern North Dakota. Wisconsin gave the largest sample, 589 plants.[2]: Supplementary Table S1
Aina and colleagues sorted the plants they sequenced into five groups: a Mississippi River group drawn from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas; two West North Central groups centred on the Dakotas, Nebraska and Iowa; a group from Indiana; and one from New York, outside the region. Genotyped at the cannabidiol synthase gene, 78 per cent of the plants fell in the type that produces mainly cannabidiol rather than THC, and total cannabinoids ranged from 0.21 to 4.73 per cent.[2] A study of feral plants from seventeen counties across Nebraska found cannabidiol to be their main cannabinoid and placed them genetically with hemp-type rather than drug-type cannabis.[9]
Gathering and destruction
Haney and Kutscheid dropped 52 of the 153 stands they had chosen for study in 1969 because they had been disturbed, most of them by what appeared to be illicit collecting.[6]: 4 In its report for 1987 the Drug Enforcement Administration counted more than 105 million plants of "ditch weed", a low-potency marijuana, destroyed in the United States that year. Indiana reported destroying the most, slightly over 67 million plants; Kansas destroyed 14 million, Nebraska 12.4 million and Minnesota 9.1 million.[10]: 3 In a survey made late in 1986, the same report noted, many Midwestern states reported people coming from other states to harvest ditchweed to mix with commercial-grade marijuana.[10]: 20 In 1989 over 124 million wild-growing plants were destroyed, more than 73 million of them in Nebraska.[11]: 4
The counts came from the states' own reports. In 1995 the Justice Department's Inspector General found that officials in six of the ten states audited had included in the programme's results eradication by agencies the programme did not fund, so that the national figures were inflated. In one state the 68.9 million ditchweed plants reported for two months of 1993 included 1.1 million added by recording errors.[12] A federal drug assessment for Nebraska in 2003 stated that ditchweed has too little THC to be worth anything as a drug, but that it is harvested and mixed with higher-grade marijuana.[13] In Indiana a county weed control board may set up a marijuana eradication programme to control the wild plant, although in most cases the sheriff or the state police reach it first.[8]
Growing Areas
Accessions
| Accession ID | Name | Collected | Locality | Area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plowman s.n., Easton (1974) | Plowman s.n. herbarium specimen, below Reavis Spring Hill Prairie, south of Easton, Illinois (1974) | Along road below Reavis Spring Hill Prairie, south of Easton |
Recent news
No news items are recorded for this growing region yet.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Dewey, Lyster H. (1914). "Hemp". Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture 1913. Washington: Government Printing Office. pp. 283–346.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Aina, Ademola; Wenger, Jonathan P.; Stanton, Eliot; Majumdar, Chandrani Gon; ElSohly, Mahmoud; Weiblen, George D.; Ellison, Shelby (1 July 2025). "Genetic diversity, population structure, and cannabinoid variation in feral Cannabis sativa germplasm from the United States". Scientific Reports. 15 (1) 20423. doi:10.1038/s41598-025-07912-8. PMC 12215616.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Ford, Tori; Aina, Ademola; Ellison, Shelby; Gordon, Tyler; Stansell, Zachary (July 2024). "Utilizing digitized occurrence records of Midwestern feral Cannabis sativa to develop ecological niche models". Ecology and Evolution. 14 (7) e11325. doi:10.1002/ece3.11325. PMC 11239322.
- ↑ Small, Ernest. "Cannabis sativa". Flora of North America, Vol. 3. Retrieved 11 October 2026 – via eFloras.org.
- ↑ Ortmeier-Clarke, Haleigh; Arneson, Nick; Ellison, Shelby; Conley, Shawn; Werle, Rodrigo (2020). "Industrial Hemp (Grain, Fiber and CBD) Research in Wisconsin: Lessons from Year 1". Wisconsin Crop Management Conference. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Department of Agronomy. Retrieved 14 October 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Haney, Alan; Kutscheid, Benjamin B. (January 1975). "An ecological study of naturalized hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) in east-central Illinois". The American Midland Naturalist. 93 (1): 1–24. doi:10.2307/2424101.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Filer, Crist N. (11 September 2020). "Minnesota wild hemp: a crucial botanical source in early cannabinoid discovery". Journal of Cannabis Research. 2 (1) 25. doi:10.1186/s42238-020-00031-3. PMC 7819329.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Nice, Glenn (24 March 2010). "Noxious and Invasive Weeds and the Weed Laws in Indiana" (PDF). Purdue Extension Weed Science, Purdue University. Retrieved 20 October 2026.
- ↑ Busta, Lucas; Dweikat, Ismail; Sato, Shirley J.; Qu, Haolin; Xue, Yong; Zhou, Bangjun; Gan, Lu; Yu, Bin; Clemente, Thomas E.; Cahoon, Edgar B.; Zhang, Chi (August 2022). "Chemical and genetic variation in feral Cannabis sativa populations across the Nebraska climate gradient". Phytochemistry. 200 113206. doi:10.1016/j.phytochem.2022.113206.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Drug Enforcement Administration, Cannabis Investigations Section (December 1987). 1987 Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program (PDF) (Report). Washington: U.S. Department of Justice. NCJ 114531. Retrieved 14 October 2026.
- ↑ Drug Enforcement Administration, Cannabis Investigations Section. 1989 Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program (PDF) (Report). Washington: U.S. Department of Justice. NCJ 126492. Retrieved 14 October 2026.
- ↑ Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice (April 1995). The Drug Enforcement Administration's Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program (Report). Audit Report 95-20. Retrieved 14 October 2026.
- ↑ National Drug Intelligence Center (July 2003). "Marijuana". Nebraska Drug Threat Assessment (Report). U.S. Department of Justice. Product No. 2003-S0389NE-001. Retrieved 20 October 2026.