On March 11, 2025, Patricia Bishop and Josh Oulton drove with their daughter Lily from Nova Scotia to the Borderview farm in Alburgh, Vermont, to hand deliver a new hemp fiber hackler to the UVM extension NWCS team. They somehow managed to fit it into the back of a sprinter van, and the Borderview farmhand, Travis Driver, also somehow managed to lift it out in one piece.
The machine is the first of its kind in the United States. Prior to NWCS’ purchase, there was only one hackler like it in all of the western hemisphere, the one belonging to Bishop and Oulton at their processing facility in the Maritime Provinces known as Taproot Fiberlab.
The hemp fiber hackler represents the third step in a three-part scutching line that Bishop and Oulton have developed over the years to process long fibers like hemp and flax at a cottage industry scale. The role of the hackler is to take the long fibers, which have already been broken or decorticated, and comb them rigorously to open up the fiber and separate the fiber bundles which are ostensibly glued together by naturally occurring lignin and pectin.
It is a dream to see UVM’s hemp processing capabilities expand as the team adds mechanized elements to the intensive, ongoing hand-processing that is necessary to extract fiber from biomass. The NWCS research group hopes that this historic moment will mark just the beginning of larger scale and more efficient fiber processing capabilities in the Northeast. Much more infrastructure will be necessary in order to see the industry grow here in Vermont and the region, but the team is in it for the long haul.
A USDA Sungrant award is a sponsor of this project, and the public can follow along with this ongoing project by searching award number AWD00001779.
