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On this week’s Hemp Podcast, Lancaster Farming speaks with Maciej Kowalski, founder and CEO of Konbinat Konopny, a hemp company based in the Polish city of Elblag on the Baltic Sea. Masu.
Kombinat Konpny is a vertically integrated hemp operator, working in both the herbal and textile sectors.
Kowalski said the company takes a no-nonsense approach to flower production and extraction.
“That means we are basically not doing any extraction because nature is doing what it does best,” he said.
Instead of a complex chemical extraction process, “we just mix hemp biomass and olive oil and mechanically press it,” he said.
“We don’t distill, we don’t extract, we don’t mess with the natural ratio of cannabinoids. Everything that’s in the plant goes into the oil,” Kowalski said, adding that this model is similar to the mainstream hemp industry’s delta-8 THC. He pointed out that this goes against the obsession with addictive substances derived from hemp.
“I’m not trying to mess with nature. I just bottled it up,” Kowalski said.
Another division of Kombinat Konopny focuses on hemp fibers.
“I’ve been working with hemp flowers for over 10 years, and hemp stalks have always been the enemy,” he said. “It was something that tied all the pieces together. So, like five or six years ago, I decided that instead of working against it, I would somehow work with it.”
Since then, Kowalski has founded a vertically integrated hemp textile company.
“We grow hemp. We harvest hemp. We do hemp decoration,” he said.
“Then we refine the fiber and spin it into yarn and actually make products out of it,” Kowalski said. “So this is a complete value chain.”
Before working on cannabis, Kowalski worked as a journalist and was trying to write an article about the Catch-22 of Polish cannabis laws.
“To grow cannabis, you need to register with the Cannabis Growers Register,” he said. But the registry didn’t exist.
He wanted to write an article that asked basic questions such as: “How can I say I’m on the registry if there’s no registry? But you can’t grow if you’re not on the registry.”
He applied for the registry knowing that his application would be rejected due to the lack of a registry.
But to his surprise (and to the detriment of his career in investigative reporting), “a wise man in the department said, ‘Well, the country can’t expect the impossible from its people.'” .
In 2014, Maciej Kowalski obtained the first private license issued for hemp in Poland.
“We wanted to show that it’s not possible, but now that we’ve proven that it’s actually possible, maybe we should start doing it,” he said.
From there, he built a successful CBD business that was acquired by a Canadian company in 2018, but the sale came with a non-compete clause that prevented Kowalski from working on CBD for two years.
“So imagine 2018,” he said. “I have a lot of money to invest. I’ve gained a lot of willpower and knowledge, but I can’t handle CBD. That’s how I got interested in fiber.”
In this interview, we also discuss winterkill, wild hemp, and how Kowalski filed a lawsuit in Poland’s Supreme Court to prove that hemp does not fall under the EU’s new food regulations.
Listen here:
Complex Konopny
https://kombinatkonopny.pl/
Maciezi on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maciejkowalskihemp/
What’s going on with Novel Foods in Europe?
https://food.ec.europa.eu/safety/novel-food_en
Thank you to all our sponsors!
IND hemp
https://indhhemp.com
National Hemp Association
https://nationalhempassociation.org/
Kings Uglyseed
https://kingsagriseeds.com/
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