The director's office at Cornell AgriTech in Geneva, New York, will soon be fitted with new flooring, made from a just-released hemp fiber cultivar bred to grow especially well in the state's climate and latitude - developed at Cornell AgriTech by Cornell researchers and grown on Cornell farms.
Ursa Alta - tall bear in Latin, named for Cornell's mascot - will supply material for multiple product streams. The outer layer of the stem consists of long fiber strands, which could be used for making textiles such as denim, while the woody inner layer works well for animal bedding and construction materials, including wall insulation.
The cultivar also consistently tests at about .02% for THC, the psychoactive compound found in cannabis and hemp - a critical breakthrough for growers who have struggled to meet New York's strict regulatory limit of 0.3% THC for hemp fiber cultivars since hemp became legal in 2018.
"We want to make the hemp enterprise as profitable as possible for New York state farmers," said Larry Smart, professor at Cornell AgriTech in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, who bred Ursa Alta with colleagues.
"We're delivering on our land-grant mission by providing growers in New York with a high-yielding, compliant hemp cultivar," said Smart, whose breeding program is primarily funded by the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets.
One of the main challenges of breeding Ursa Alta was removing genes that produce THC from the seed population, which originated in China. Through work in his lab, Smart has identified genes involved in THC production. His lab has also developed molecular markers - DNA sequences that flag the presence of genes for producing THC.
"We can apply these molecular markers to screen each individual seedling and identify whether it has genes for THC production," Smart said. When seedlings have the THC genes, they are eliminated while plants without them are kept. By repeating and fine tuning this process, the breeders developed seeds that consistently deliver the desired traits when planted.
When grown across northern latitudes, Ursa Alta delivers among the highest yields of top-producing commercial fiber cultivars. Aside from being suited to New York's climate, it also produced well in other high latitude research field trials at the University of Vermont, Michigan State University and the University of Wisconsin. Though its yields are lower when planted further south, the cultivar can produce across almost all latitudes of the United States - including Lubbock, Texas, close to the largest hemp processing facility in North America, which is at a latitude that previously lacked well-adapted cultivars.
Fiber hemp seed from China often exceeds the THC regulatory limit, and cultivars developed in Europe are not as productive as Ursa Alta, Smart said. "This cultivar that we've developed has very consistently and dramatically outperformed the longstanding cultivars that have been bred in France, Poland, Italy, Hungary and Ukraine," Smart said.
Smart and colleagues are working with an established seed company, Condor Seeds in Yuma, Arizona, which has signed a commercial license with Cornell and is currently selling Ursa Alta seeds.
In New York state, hemp is planted starting in mid-May and should be harvested around the second week of October.
HempWood, a company in Calloway County, Kentucky, produced the floorboards to be used in the office of Christine Smart, the Goichman Family Director at Cornell AgriTech. The hemp material came from 2024 Cornell research field trials.
