A rare opportunity for the natural building community has arrived in the Texas Hill Country: Saoirse Learning Center, a working hempcrete and natural materials campus on 9.71 acres in Blanco, TX, is on the market.

Oregon State University's Global Hemp Innovation Center brought together nine hemp construction companies and ten invited trainees in Corvallis this June for a five-day Train-the-Trainer Workshop focused on hemp-based building systems.

Supplies and construction techniques involving the use of hemp are now being pursued in experiments by a University of New Mexico Professor and a local business owner.

Canadian building technology firm Renewabuild Field to Form Ltd. announced its first official U.S. licensing agreement this month. The agreement, signed with newly formed Renewabuild Great Plains, Inc., greenlights a planned manufacturing facility in Rock Valley, Iowa, to produce an interlocking load-bearing hemp-lime wall system.

The first phase of a large hempcrete-based care-home complex being developed by Nepal-based Shah Hemp Inno-Ventures (SHIV) is nearing completion, marking the latest milestone in a decade-long effort by founders Dhiraj Shah and Nivedita Bansal Shah to build commercial and social infrastructure with hemp across South Asia.

An Australian webinar with Dutch-Australian designer Joost Bakker unveiled details of Hollywood actor Zac Efron’s new $2.25 million hempcrete home being built this year in a tropical forest in New South Wales.  

A British streaming video production company is looking for unique North American homes under construction and producers are especially interested in the use of unconventional materials.

The president and vice president of a trade association for US hemp builders announced they were resigning, and three elected new board members announced they were declining to serve in a message to members.

Amid the hurricane destruction, one building material demonstrated an important advantage in the aftermath of the storms: Hemp blocks produced by Cânhamor, also in Portugal, and used in the walls of a couple of renovated structures in the village.

In this episode of the Hemp Build Podcast, host Ray Kaderli is joined by Tim Callahan of Callahan Home Designs to discuss the landmark inclusion of hemp-lime (hempcrete) into the International Residential Code (IRC).

The Montana Department of Commerce has awarded a $35,000 Agritourism Grant to IND HEMP to fund the construction of a hemp-based, climate-smart storage and demonstration facility.

Whistle-blowing board members at a trade association for the US hemp building industry complained this week about irregularities in a board election and said that reported election results were unreliable. Winning candidates who had unpaid dues were stripped from the ballot after the election was over, whistleblowers said.

Ten years after the invention of a "Lego-style" interlocking hempcrete block captured the imagination of the hemp building world, the technology is making a comeback under a new name and a revamped business model.

The Hemp Build Podcast Ep. 7 presents an interview with Hempitecture’s Mattie Mead and Annie Ball discussing the history of hemp batt fiber insulation and how specifiers can achieve lower embodied carbon and more healthy spaces with a natural plant fiber instead of spray foam or mineral wool insulation.

Students from the Pratt Institute are teaming up with local community group Mothers on the Move to explore how hemp—a building material rarely used in housing—could help retrofit New York’s oldest buildings, improving indoor air quality and lowering heating and cooling emissions.

An industrial hemp research team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York has been awarded $1 million to build a state-funded manufacturing laboratory designed to bridge the gap between raw hemp fiber and the industrial market

Hemp builders and manufacturers of industrial hemp-based building materials will be well-represented at a new conference in Denver planned for March.

The first Industrial Hemp International conference will take place March 25-27 at the Hyatt Regency Aurora-Denver Conference Center. The conference and expo is organized by Morris Beegle and the experienced team that ran the NoCo Hemp Expo for 11 years in northern Colorado.

Virginia-based hemp-lime builder Scott McStacy single-handedly submitted a proposal to adopt International Residential Code Appendix BL (Hemp-Lime “Hempcrete” Construction) into the Virginia Uniform Statewide Building Code – and on Jan. 6, McStacy appeared before the Board of Housing and Community Development’s General Stakeholder Workgroup Meeting in Glen Allen, VA  and urged the board to adopt Appendix BL. The vote was unanimous in favor. 

The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation’s agriculture business grows hemp without irrigation, insecticides or plowing. Now its product is helping to build a home in Ogden, KS.

In Episode 5 of the Hemp Build Podcast, host Ray Kaderli goes inside the Cleburne, Texas facility of CannaVision with CEO David Russell to show how industrial hemp is processed into consistent, construction-ready materials. You’ll see hemp bales fresh from the field, how fiber and woody core are separated, how materials are sized and refined, and how precision processing makes hemp suitable for real-world building applications—from hemp-lime (hempcrete) walls to plasters, insulation, and bio-composites.