Learning that Panda Biotech has opened a hemp processing facility that’s the biggest in the U.S. and among the largest in the world is one thing. Beholding the 500,000-square-foot gin, running nearly autonomously, is another thing entirely.
When I visited the Wichita Falls plant, just twenty miles from the Oklahoma border, advanced machines called decorticators were chewing through raw fiber and spitting out fine dust that gets swept up and recirculated into other nontextile products. Bales of finished fibers in varying brownish grays were stacked in neat lines, some almost as tall as the 45-foot roof. All of them were tagged with QR codes, which pinpoint where the seed sprouted, giving textile buyers and brands rare insight into their supply chain. From the moment the raw hemp stalks are loaded onto the conveyor belt, no human hand is required to turn them into finished fibers. Right now, these fibers are …