The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) handles hemp registrations for all value chain participants including growers, processors and dealers. An Industrial Hemp Dealer buys industrial hemp from a grower and sells that industrial hemp to another dealer or to a processor. The Industrial Hemp Dealer Registration is not intended for a retail establishment selling a hemp product. The application fee is $250.

The long arm of the law will be hovering around this program. Here are a few extracts from the application form:

• An individual with a felony drug conviction within 10 years of the application date is not eligible for an Industrial Hemp Dealer Registration.
• Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS)will forward a record of each Industrial Hemp Dealer Registration to the chief law enforcement officer of the locality in which the registered dealer will deal industrial hemp.
• VDACS will notify the Superintendent of State Police of the locations of all industrial hemp dealerships.
• The Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services may advise the Superintendent of State Police or the chief law-enforcement officer of the appropriate county or city when a dealer deals any Cannabis sativa with a concentration of THC that is greater than that allowed by law (0.3%).

In addition to those ominous warnings, the regulator asked for the size of the dealership: “Dealership” means the location at which a dealer stores or intends to store the industrial hemp in which he deals. The numbers provided ranged from a low of 25 square feet all the way up to 566,280 square feet. That license holder has also applied for a cultivation license of 10 acres so that that would still give him 130,680 square feet for storage (3 acres) so he should be good.

In reviewing locations, the 246 licenses are widely distributed across 155 towns.   Here are the cities with the most hemp dealers registered:

License holders were also asked what kind of hemp variety they would deal with. The choices included Fiber, Grain, Floral or all of the above. Based on the 153 who responded, here is the breakdown of the choices:

The team is working on the processors as well as the thousands of cultivation licenses. We’ll report on those in a future post.

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